Nushelle de Silva is a historian of the built environment; her research is broadly concerned with the relationships between architecture and mobility from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Her current areas of interest include portable architectures and their materials; physical infrastructures for moving objects, people, and ideas; the effects of movement on the production and reception of design objects; and spatial forms of preservation for objects in transit.
She 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 an Assistant Professor in Art History at Fordham University.
Her current book project, Conveying Culture: Traveling Museum Exhibitions and the Technopolitics of Care, 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 fellowships and grants from MIT, Ithaca College, the Winterthur Museum, the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the Society for Architectural Historians, the Design History Society, and the Association for Art History, among others.
