PhD candidate Curt Gambetta has been awarded three fellowships for his dissertation research in India. Gambetta received a Fulbright-Nehru award for doctoral research, the International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and a Junior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). All three grants will be used to support his project, "Substitutions of Modernity: Materials and Subalternity in postcolonial India."
Gambetta's dissertation examines how architects, engineers, contractors and craftspeople in India substituted for new and otherwise inaccessible materials and building technologies in response to distance and conditions of scarcity after Independence in 1947 and economic liberalization after the 1980s. It challenges prevailing narratives about ‘development’ and modern architecture in the global South by looking at how architecture is produced in conditions of technological delay and temporal suspension. He will conduct historical and ethnographic study of construction sites, workshops, and other sites where materials are used, made, and maintained, focusing on different case studies in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi.
