Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Renee Tobe
Professor
Renée Tobe is Professor of Architecture at the Leeds School of Arts, Leeds Beckett University. She is author of Film, Architecture and Spatial Imagination (Routledge, 2017); editor of Architecture and Justice (Ashgate, 2013) and Humanities in Architectural Design (Routledge 2010).
Renée's current work investigates Western and non-Western expressions of architecture and film. She is currently writing Plato for Architects, for the Routledge Thinkers for Architects series to explicate and understand the basis of Western thinking. She is co-editor of Race and Space special edition of Charrette (2023), and Repurposing Places for Social and Environmental Resilience special edition for the Journal of Architecture (2025).
Renée has been invited to lecture in institutions across the UK, Europe, Russia, the USA, Poland, and contributed to conferences internationally. She is an invited speaker at the British Film Institute, the Architectural Association and the Paul Mellon Centre. Her published articles and book chapters include research on the cross-over between architecture and film looking specifically at the dialogue about Modernity and cultural expressions.
Current Teaching
- BArch - AC1.1 Context
- BA Interior Design - IAD4.3 Context
- MArch - Context A, Context B
Research Interests
Renée's research interests interconnect architecture and urban design with literature, film, gender and inclusivity in order to understand and enhance the worlds we build for ourselves whether in our imaginations, in film, as literature or in the built environment. Her publications include research into connections between television and tourism in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, postcolonial identity in the UK films that take place in London in the 1960s, gender in graphic novels, as well as temporal disparities in 20th century films.
Renée has connections in both practice and academia. She trained at the Architectural Association and read for her doctorate at Cambridge University. She received a research fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University, Paul Mellon Centre Award for Architecture at the British School at Rome. She is currently Research Director for Architecture at LBU. She has been External Examiner at the Canadian University in Cairo, the KTH in Stockholm and across the UK.
Ask Me About
- Cities
- Racial and spatial justice
- Marginalised communities
- Displacement
- Architecture
- Art
- Culture
- Design
- Equality and inclusion
- Film
- Gender
- History
- Justice
- Landscape architecture
- Literature
- Northernness
- Politics
- Popular culture
- Tourism
- Urban
- Wellbeing
