Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty is an internationally renowned architectural historian who has hugely advanced our understanding of modern architecture through her scholarship, her public engagement, and through her role as a prominent public intellectual.

At the core of her scholarship lies the considered reappraisal of the roots of modern architecture in twentieth-century German politics and social conditions. She has highlighted the importance of both commercial and sacred architecture to the discussion of a topic that is often presumed to have largely socialist and as such secular origins. She has examined how architecture relates to a mass audience that includes both the working class and immigrants. In her publications she has overturned convenient myths that equate, for instance, modernism with democracy, and demonstrated why they nonetheless appeal and endure.

In her work on twentieth-century German architecture, she has created a new conceptual framework, integrating politics and society. Starting with her first publication ‘Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism’ she has sought to re-write the narratives on the International Style and architectural Modernism, tracing architectural continuities through the changing politics of Germany. She followed this with ‘German Architecture for a Mass Audience’; it focuses on the years 1913 to 1939 and examines the endeavour to unite society though community-centred buildings. While, her book on Architecture since 1400 views the evolution of Modernism as a global phenomenon, avoiding the prevailing Eurocentric perspective, and including women as patrons, users and architects.

In her most recent contribution Modernism as Memory, she makes a unique contribution to the study of memory politics and this work been described as ‘exemplary in the originality of its scholarship and the lucidity of its critical writing’.

After a professorship in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Kathleen James-Chakraborty was appointed Professor of Art History at University College Dublin in 2007. She was Mercator Visiting Professor at the Ruth-Universität Bochum in 2005, and in 2015 and 2016 she was the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at the Yale School of Architecture. She has lectured around the world, including delivering the keynote addresses to the American, Chinese and French professional associations of architectural historians.

Kathleen James-Chakraborty is a committed and generous public intellectual. She is a past chair of the Irish Architecture Foundation and a current member of the board of the Society of Architectural Historians, and of the Building of Ireland Charitable Trust, the Chester Beatty Library and the National Museum of Ireland.

She is a scholar of the highest standing, who through her insight and reach has exceeded the boundaries of her discipline.