Preeti Chopra

Education
B.Arch. in Architecture, School of Architecture, Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad, India, 1987
M.L.A. Department of Landscape Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, 1993
M.C.P. Department of City; Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley, 1993
Ph.D. Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, 2003

Research Interests
Modern architectural and urban history, the spatial landscapes of empire, visual and spatial cultures and the history of South Asia, material culture, postcolonial theory and cultural studies.

Awards
Suzanne Deal Booth Rome Prize Winner (2022–23)

Publications
“The West is the Best: World History of Architecture as Imperial Form of Knowledge,” in Narrating the Globe: The Emergence of World Histories of Architecture, edited by Petra Brouwer, Martin Bressani, and Christopher Drew Armstrong, 131–57 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023).

“South & South-East Asia,” in Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, edited by G. A. Bremner, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, 278–317, plates 15, 16 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

“The Poetics and Politics of Space: Art, Memory and Change in the Indian City,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 2, iss. 1 (2016):1–27. Special issue on “Asian Urbanisms and Urbanizations,” edited by Madhuri Desai and Shuang Shen.

“The Colonial Bombay Town Hall: Engaging the Function and Quality of Public Space, 1811–1918,” in City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space, Architext series, edited by Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White, 158–76 (London: Routledge, 2014).

“‘Where are you from?’ Belonging after Partition,” Tanqeed: a magazine of politics and culture 1, iss. V: Space (August 2013) [english translation]. Urdu translation: http://www.tanqeed.org/2013/08/journeys-to-ancestral-homeands-in-pakistan-and-india-urdu/

“Free to move, forced to flee: the formation and dissolution of suburbs in colonial Bombay,” Urban History 39, iss. 1 (2012):83–107.

“From part to the whole,” in Poppo Pingel, Auroville Architects Monograph Series, by Mona Doctor-Pingel, 165–68 (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2012).

A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

“Refiguring the Colonial City: Recovering the Role of Local Inhabitants in the Construction of Colonial Bombay,” Buildings and Landscapes 14 (Fall 2007):109–25.

“La Ville Imaginée: Nommer Les Divisions de Bombay Coloniale (1800–1918),” in Divisions de la ville, edited by Christian Topalov, 125–56 (Paris: Editions UNESCO: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’hommes [collection “Les Mots de la ville”], 2002).

“Pondicherry: A French Enclave in India,” in Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, edited by Nezar AlSayyad, 107–37 (Aldershot: Avebury/Gower House, 1992).

Teaching
AH/LCA 379: Cities of Asia
AH/LCA 428: Visual Cultures of South Asia
AH/LCA 621: Mapping, Making, and Representing Colonial Spaces
AH 500/AH 800/DS 642: Taste
AH 802: Topics in Visual Cultures: The Everyday: Lives, Spaces, and Things