Nushelle de Silva received her PhD in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022. She holds a SMArchS, also from MIT, and a BA in Architecture from Princeton University. She is currently a Diversity Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow at Ithaca College and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Brighton.
Her work is broadly concerned with how culture is defined and deployed to further imperialism in the present. Research on Sri Lanka includes examinations of how heritage discourse was distorted to maintain ethnic hegemony during the Civil War and the subversion of counter-cultural movements by the government in the 1980s-1990s to bolster majoritarianism. Her master’s thesis analyzed a U.S. industrial exhibit that touted capitalist development in three non-aligned countries: Sri Lanka, India, and Ghana.
Her doctoral dissertation, “Moving Experiences: Traveling Museum Exhibitions and the Infrastructures of Cultural Globalization,” examines how the ambitions of international organizations dedicated to cultural peace-building (predominantly UNESCO) spatially reorganized museums to prioritize object exchange through traveling exhibitions in the mid-twentieth century, and argues that the uneven globalization facilitated by these exhibitions still augments rather than alleviates the coloniality of museums.
Her research has been supported by the Society of Architectural Historians, the Design History Society, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Winterthur Museum, among others.
