Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi

Academic Year 2026-2027

Hutchins Family Foundation Fellow

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an art and architectural historian of Africa and South Asia. Committed to the centrality of histories of art and architecture within the world of ideas, her work narrates urgent matters of global migration and displacement, racial and environmental justice, and colonial and postcolonial spatial politics through historical research on significant structures and figures little recognized as purveyors of political, social, and aesthetic value. Her scholarship focuses on histories of architecture, craft, settlement, and land, and experiences of migration and territorial partition, drawing from yearslong archival, visual, and interview-based research in Africa, Asia, and Europe for two scholarly monographs, Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, “Theory in Forms” series; 2026 Society of Architectural Historians Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award, 2025 African Studies Association Best Book Prize Honorable Mention) and Ecologies of the Past (in progress). Her research foregrounds collective histories and collaborative methods. Siddiqi is an Associate Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. For more, see www.anooradhaiyersiddiqi.net.

Ecologies of the Past

Ecologies of the Past is an intellectual history examining questions of environmental justice, social and political imagination, and critical heritage emerging from the singular labors of Sri Lankan art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier (1909-1996) and architect Minnette de Silva (1918-1998), two figures who consolidated ecological knowledge and structured the writing of global histories of the constructed environment. Their centering of heritage landscapes and ecologically-rooted crafts through diverse intellectual labor and historically significant collaborations staged a field-defining epistemic intervention, which fueled pan-Asian and Afro-Asian architectural, arts, and cultural practice and discourse. This book draws from unique archival access and work with craftspersons cultivating intergenerational knowledge and practices, and is based on primary research in Sri Lanka, India, Hong Kong, Greece, France, England, Switzerland, Canada, and the United States.