Yale Architecture Forum
Swati Chattopadhyay
Culinary Racism and the Small Spaces of Empire
Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An architect and architectural historian, she specializes in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of the British empire. She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (2005), Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (2012), Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (2023), and the co-editor with Jeremy White of City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (2014), and Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (2019). Her current work includes Nature’s Infrastructure: The British Empire and the Making of the Gangetic Plains, 1760-1880, a book project funded by the Guggenheim Foundation, and two digital humanities projects, Mapping the Ephemeral, and Bookscapes. She is a founding editor of PLATFORM.