Panayiota Pyla is an architectural historian and theorist with a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently associate professor of architecture at the University of Cyprus, having previously served on the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Among her works is the edited book Landscapes of Development: The Impact of Modernization Discourses on the Physical Environment of the Eastern Mediterranean (Harvard University Press, 2013) and the book (coedited with Sibel Bozdogan and Petros Phokaides) Coastal Architectures and the Politics of Tourism: Leisurescapes of the Global Sunbelt (Routledge, forthcoming 2022).