Ateya Khorakiwala is an architectural historian who 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.

Ateya is co-appointed with the Humanities Council at Princeton, whose generous support made this fellowship possible.