Ateya Khorakiwala

Ateya Khorakiwala
Visiting Lecturer
B.Arch., Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture, Mumbai University, 2005
M.Sc., Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009
Ph.D., Architecture, Landscape and Urban Planning, Harvard University, 2017
ateyakhorakiwala.com

Contact
Office: Architecture Building, S-110
E-mail: khorakiwala@princeton.edu

Profile
Ateya Khorakiwala is an architectural historian who is currently a Mellon Fellow with the Princeton Initiative for Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. She researches the aesthetic, social, and material aspects of post-colonial India’s modernization and decolonization project as well as its attendant efforts to build the Global South. Her doctoral dissertation, which she recently completed at Harvard University, examines the urban and infrastructural transformation of India’s northwest—the Punjab-Delhi region—in the aftermath of the devastating Bengal Famine of 1943 to investigate how technocrats engaged developmental discourse to produce new and transnational expertise around architectural materials like concrete, puzzolana, and steel, and basic commodities like water, wheat, and fertilizer, in the drive to secure the Indian body from starvation. Khorakiwala’s research has received various grants and awards including an American Institute for Indian Studies junior fellowship. She is a contributor to the Systems and the South project of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative and is currently organizing a panel for AAS on Infrastructure's of Agriculture in South Asia. While at Princeton, she is researching “externalities” of modern urban-architectural materials—bitumen, bamboo, and plastic—which are marginal but crucial to cement and steel construction, and the global supply chains that manage them.