SAH member Swati Chattopadhyay received the Historians of British Art's 2025 Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1800-1960 for her work, "Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire," published by Bloomsbury, 2023.
The committee wrote:
"In this fascinating, engaging, and experimental book, Swati Chattopadhyay examines a variety of small spaces and objects produced by empire—from the bottlekhana to the verandah, potted plants to homeopathic medicine chests—and the way they proliferated modes of engagement with the world. Chattopadhyay draws on an eclectic array of archival documents including recipe books, trade reports, servant lists, memoirs, and visual artifacts to read the microdynamics of such seemingly insignificant locales in practical and poetic terms, recasting them as sites of emergence in which power, community, and solidarity were negotiated. Her genre-bending mode of narration unfolds a world in which minor places and things fostered habitation, imagination, resistance, and creativity, and while her focus is on British India, she compellingly makes the case for the significance of small spaces and their challenge to master spaces and master narratives in other contexts."
From HBA's website: 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. She is the author of Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (2012); Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (2005), and the co-editor with Jeremy White of City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (2014), and Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (2019). Her current book project, Nature’s Infrastructure: The British Empire and the Making of the Gangetic Plains, 1760-1880, is supported by the Guggenheim Foundation. 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.
HBA is an affiliate society of the College Art Association (CAA) in North America, HBA promotes scholarship and other professional endeavors related to British art and architecture, broadly conceived in terms of place and time.
