Welcome CCS Associate Dean Swati Chattopadhyay

New associate dean joins the College of Creative Studies

“I’m so grateful and excited for Professor Chattopadhyay to join our CCS community in the year ahead,” said CCS Dean Gerardo Aldana of new CCS Associate Dean Swati Chattopadhyay. “She brings extensive campus administrative experience to the college, having served as a Department Chair, on the Academic Senate Council on Planning and Budget, on the campus Program Review Panel, on the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on the Status of Women, as departmental Undergraduate and Graduate Advisor, and on numerous search committees.”

Professor Chattopadhyay accepted a professorial position at UCSB in 1997 with a background as an architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urbanism and the cultural landscape of the British empire. Her many accolades include receiving fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, the University of London, and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. For a lifetime of significant contributions to the field, Professor Chattopadhyay was also named a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2018.

In addition, Professor Chattopadhyay is a founding editor of PLATFORM, a digital venue for conversations about architecture, and the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005; paperback 2006), and Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012). She has co-edited City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Routledge, 2014) and Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Taylor and Francis, 2019) with Jeremy White, a lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Architecture.

The College welcomes Professor Chattopadhyay to CCS!