Nushelle de Silva

Assistant Professor of Art History

Lowenstein 415C
Fordham University - Lincoln Center Campus
113 W. 60th Street
New York, NY 10023

Email: [email protected] 

Education

PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; SMArchS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; AB, Princeton University. 

Specialization

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Architecture in the Global South; Colonial Rule and Globalization; Architecture and International Development; Histories of Art Museums; Exhibition Exchange

Biography

Nushelle de Silva is a historian of the built environment; her research is broadly concerned with the relationships between architecture and mobility from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Her current areas of interest include portable architectures and their materials; physical infrastructures for moving objects, people, and ideas; the effects of movement on the production and reception of design objects; and spatial forms of preservation for objects in transit.

Her current book project, tentatively titled Conveying Culture: Traveling Museum Exhibitions and the Technopolitics of Care, is a spatial history of how the field of preventive conservation evolved alongside the proliferation of exhibitions shared between museums in the aftermath of World War II and how the architecture of museums transformed accordingly.

Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from MIT, Ithaca College, the Winterthur Museum, the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the Society for Architectural Historians, the Design History Society, the Association for Art History, and Towards Equity in Publishing (sponsored by the Dedalus Foundation/American Art journal).