As part of the 2012-13 Benjamin West Lecture Series: Critical Histories of Modern Architecture and the Built Environment, the Bryn Mawr growth and structures of cities department is sponsoring a lecture by Kathleen James-Chakraborty. The lecture is titled, “From the Bauhaus in Calcutta to the Swiss Minaret Debate: Who Wants Modern Architecture and Why?”

Kathleen James-Chakraborty has been professor of art history at University College Dublin 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 (professor of architecture), and at the Ruhr University Bochum (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.  James-Chakraborty is an expert on 20th-century German and American modernism.