UCD School of Art History & Cultural Policy

Kathleen James-Chakraborty has been Professor of Art History at UCD since 2007.  From 2007 to 2010 she served as Head of the UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy.  A graduate of Yale University, James-Chakraborty earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.  She has taught at the University of Minnesota, at the University of California Berkeley, where she was Professor of Architecture, and at the Ruhr University Bochum, where she was a Mercator guest professor.  Elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2011, she is also the Chair of the Board of the Irish Architecture Foundation, a trustee of the Chester Beatty Library, and the Irish national representative to the International Congress of Art Historians.  In addition, she has been a Gambrinus Fellow at the Technical University in Dortmund and twice chaired the Alice Davis Hitchcock Prize committee for the Society of Architectural Historians (US).

James-Chakraborty is a historian of early modern and modern architecture.  She is an expert on twentieth-century German and American modernism.  She is particularly interested in addition in modern sacred architecture, in nonwestern modernism, and in the relationship between modernism and modernity.  She is currently completing a book on memory in postwar German architecture, for which she received an IRCHSS Senior Fellowship, and a monograph on the work of Louis Kahn.