
Specialization:
Modern architecture and urbanism; Cultural landscape of colonialism; British empire; Postcolonial and critical theory.
Education:
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
M.Arch. University of Arizona
B.Arch. Jadavpur University
Bio:
Swati Chattopadhyay is an architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of the British empire. Her awards include a Senior Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies, a J. Paul Getty Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Grant, a Fellowship from the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship from Queen Mary, University of London, a Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities Fellowship, University of London, and the Society of Architectural Historian's Founder's Award. She is a Founding Editor of PLATFORM , and has served as a director of the Subaltern-Popular Workshop, a University of California Multi-campus Research Group, and as the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH). In 2018 she was named as a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians for a lifetime of significant contributions to the field. She is the recipient of the 2025 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award
from the Society of Architectural Historians, and the 2025 Historians of British Art Book Award
(1800-1960) for Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is also the author of Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012); and Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005; paperback 2006), and co-editor with Jeremy White of Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Taylor and Francis, 2019); and City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Routledge, 2014). She is the current Vice President of the Society of Architectural Historians.