Meet the Author
Huma Gupta
Huma Gupta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at MIT in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. She is affiliated with the History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture group and the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Dr. Gupta's scholarship deals with the historical emergence of hierarchies and pathways toward dismantling them that span from critique to epistemic interventions. Her research historicizes and theorizes hierarchical systems that span urban housing, the devaluation of rural housing, and the relationship between building materials and the climate crisis. In her archival research that centers other human and more-than-human subjects, she challenges centuries of dehumanizing representation of rural migrants and marsh inhabitants through documentary filmmaking. Dr. Gupta’s current book project The Architecture of Dispossession theorizes the relationship between state-building and dispossession through architectural transformations of migrant reed and clay dwellings in twentieth-century Iraq. Her scholarship has been published by the Journal of Architectural Education, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, MIT Press, and Yale University Press.
