Swati Chattopadhyay
Fluid Histories: Imagining the Architecture of the Bengal Delta
We are delighted to welcome Swati Chattopadhyay to Newcastle to deliver a lecture on "Fluid Histories: Imagining the Architecture of the Bengal Delta".
Synopsis
The peculiar geomorphology of the delta of the Ganga River in Bengal has haunted modern cartographic and administrative imaginaries since the mid-eighteenth century. The rivers here changed their course so frequently that riverine mapping became a fraught enterprise. Analyzing this riverine infrastructure, and specifically the nexus of waterbodies, crop fields, and villages that comprised the floodplains, Swati Chattopadhyay queries some basic assumptions of architectural and landscape history that conceive land in terms of permanence, fixity, and property. The hydrological and durational parameters of the Bengal delta, Chattopadhyay argues, offers opportunities for historical reading commensurate with the fluvial landscape itself—mobile and open to rapid change, significations, and framing.
Biography
Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture with an affiliated appointment in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An architect and architectural historian, she specializes in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of the British empire. Her most recent book is Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023). Her current book project, The Art of Sovereignty: Making and Unmaking the British Empire, is supported by a Senior Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art. A Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians, and former editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, she a founding editor of PLATFORM.
