ProfessorKathleen James-Chakraborty

A historian of modern architecture, Kathleen James-Chakraborty has been Professor of Art History at UCD since 2007. A graduate of Yale, James-Chakraborty earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at the University of California Berkeley, where she reached the rank of full professor, at the Ruhr University Bochum, where she was a Mercator guest professor, and at the Yale School of Architecture, where she was the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History. In 2019 she received the Gold Medal in the Humanities from the Royal Irish Academy. James-Chakrabortty's books include Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Cambridge, 1997), German Architecture for a Mass Audience (Routledge, 2000) Architecture since 1400 (Minnesota, 2014; Guangxi, 2017),  and Modernism as Memory; Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany (Minnesota, 2018).  She is also a co-author with Katherine Kuenzli and Bryan Clark Green of The Belgian Friendship Building: From the New York World's Fair to a Virginia HBCU (VIrginia, 2025). . She is the editor of India in Art in Ireland (Routledge, 2016) and Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War (Minnesota, 2006), and most recently the co-editor with Alborz Dianat of Minding Her Business: Women, Architecture, and Design (Leuven, 2026). Her articles have appeared in German Politics and Society, the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and New German Critique. She has contributed to the catalogues of exhibitions held at the Barbican (London), Folkwang Museum (Essen), the German Architectural Museum (Frankfurt), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Architecture Biennale (Venice), as well as many edited books. In April 2021 she was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant, and during the 2021-22 academic year she held an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowship at the Center at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C..