People

Co-Chairs:

Ipek Türeli, McGill University

Ipek Tureli is Associate Professor of Architecture and Canada Research Chair in Architectures of Spatial Justice at McGill University. Her research engages with spatial justice, urban media and visual culture. Her books include co-edited book Orienting Istanbul (2010) and authored book Istanbul Open City (2018). Her work has been published in the Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, History of Photography, European Journal of Turkish Studies, the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and Global Discourse. Her current book project explores early American campus landscapes and race outside the Americas. Her work has received support from the Graham Foundation, Middle East Research Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), and Canada Foundation for Innovation. She serves on the board of directors of the Society of Architectural Historians and on the advisory council of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, and as a book review editor for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 

Madhuri Shrikant Desai, Penn State University

Madhuri Desai is an Associate Professor of Art History and Asian Studies at Penn State University.  Her research interests are in the area of South Asian architectural and urban history with a concentration on the Early Modern and colonial periods. Her first monograph Banaras Reconstructed: Architecture and Sacred Space in a Hindu Holy City (University of Washington Press, 2017), is an in-depth study of the remaking of the city of Banaras between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book presents a fresh perspective on an iconic city as well as on the making of sacred urban environments in South Asia. The book received the 2019 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Dr. Desai is a recipient of fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Social Science Research Council, Yale University’s Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London), and the Institute for Arts and Humanities at Penn State. Dr. Desai is currently working on two projects that engage questions of archaism and formal revival in Early Modern South Asia.

Previous Chairs:

Itohan Osayimwese, Brown University
Lynne Horiuchi, Independent Scholar

Founding Members:

Jesús Escobar, Northwestern University
Charles Davis II, University at Buffalo