Expanding Agency: Women, Race and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture

Kathleen James-Chakraborty is a historian of modern architecture.  She is Professor of Art History at UCD.  She has previously taught at the University of Minnesota and at the University of California Berkeley and been a visiting guest professor at the Ruhr Universität Bochum and the Yale School of Architecture.  Her books include German Architecture for a Mass Audience (Routledge, 2000), Architecture since 1400 (Minnesota, 2014) and Modernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany (Minnesota 2018), as well as the edited collections Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War (Minnesota, 2006) and India in Art in Ireland (Routledge, 2016).  She was awarded the 2018 gold medal in the humanities from the Royal Irish Academy, the first woman to be so honoured.

Ipek completed her PhD in Architecture at McGill University, Canada, in 2021, supported by the Québec government’s FRQ-SC Fellowship, and was awarded the Architectural Research Centers Consortium King Student Medal upon completion. She has taught in architectural schools at Rice University, the University of Toronto, and McGill University. Her research has been published as journal articles and book chapters, and she is currently working towards completing her manuscript on women’s contributions to architectural knowledge, practice, and networking through mobility in the post-Second World War period. As part of the Expanding Agency project, she is examining women’s work at the intersection of journalism, activism, and modern architecture in feminist newspapers in Turkey in the 1940s to 1960s.

Pooja Sastry is trained as an urban planner from the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology in Ahmedabad, India. Her past work experience includes transit-oriented development, heritage-based economic development, policy and regulatory frameworks, public-sector stakeholder management, and watershed analysis using GIS-based data. Her areas of interest are feminist public policy and technological futures.

Theresa completed her PhD in Social Justice at University College Dublin as an Ad Astra Doctoral Scholar, conducting ethnographic research on queer masculinities and friendships. Her own work focuses on gender, sexualities, and masculinities through queer and feminist approaches, and she has experience managing and contributing to complex EU-funded research projects.