Christine Mengin, the holder of a PhD in art history and a law degree, is a lecturer in the history of contemporary architecture at the Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she is currently the vice-president in charge of international affairs. She is also the co-author of a textbook on the history of modern architecture in France, published in 1997 by Éditions Picard, and has written Guerre du toit et modernité architecturale : loger l’employé sous la république de Weimar (“Roof wars and architectural modernity: housing employees under the Weimar Republic”), Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007), as well as various articles on the housing history, German architecture and judicial architecture in France and the United States. She is a founding member of the European Architectural History Network (www.eahn.org), of which she was president from 2005 to 2010. Her current research concentrates on the heritage preservation of the urban form; a publication she has co-directed with Alain Godonou on the heritage of Porto-Novo, Benin is due to be released in 2011.