Professor, History of Art and Architecture

Swati Chattopadhyay is an architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of British colonialism. She is interested in the ties between colonialism and modernism, and in the spatial aspects of race, gender, and ethnicity in modern cities that are capable of enriching post-colonial and critical theory. Her awards include a National Science Foundation Grant, two grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, a J. Paul Getty Fellowship, a Fellowship from the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship from Queen Mary, University of London, and the Society of Architectural Historian’s Founder’s Award. She has served as a director of the Subaltern-Popular Workshop, a University of California Multi-campus Research Group, and is the current editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. She has also co-edited a special issue of PostColonial Studies focusing on “the subaltern and the popular,” and guest-edited a special section of Urban History, titled, “Suburbs in India.” She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny and Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field. Her current work includes a new book project, “Nature’s Infrastructure,” dealing with the infrastructural transformation of the Gangetic Plains between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Select EH Courses: Nineteenth-Century Architecture, Twentieth-Century Architecture, The City in History, and Landscape of Colonialism