Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi received a PhD in the History of Art and Archaeology from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and her historical and ethnographic research focuses on spatial politics, urbanisms, and modernist culture and discourses, drawing from primary research in East Africa and South Asia. Siddiqi is writing a book manuscript entitled Architecture of Humanitarianism: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Emergency Urbanism in History; it examines a history of forced migration through liberating and coercive settlement in Kenya and the Somali borderlands, the visual rhetoric of the Dadaab refugee camps, and humanitarian spatial practices, material culture, and iconography from the eighteenth century to the present. She is conducting research on the figuration of the modern architect and field of architectural practice in imperial South Asia for another book project, Vocal Instruments: Minnette De Silva and an Asian Modern Architecture; it examines constructions of and claims on craft, patrimony, heritage, and modernism in the discourses and practices of the Archaeological Survey of India, the colleges of architecture and engineering, and the journal MARG, refracted through the intellectual work of architect Minnette De Silva and those in her spheres. Siddiqi’s work has received support from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Social Science Research Council, the Graham Foundation, New York University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She co-edited the volume Spatial Violence, and practiced architecture in the United States and India. She will be joining the faculty of Barnard College in 2018.