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Nubras Samayeen

Nubras Samayeen is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint program of Landscape and Architecture. Her research focuses on the American architect Louis Kahn’s design. It probes the instrumentality of Western colonialism and modernism in homogenizing different worlds of distinctive tradition and culture across the globe. She completed her degrees in architecture and urban design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has has been involved with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory since 2016 and received her certification in 2019. In 2020, she was awarded the IPRH-Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. She is also a recipient of AAUW (2018), and the Dumberton Oaks Fellowship from Harvard University (2018). She co-authored “A Necropolitical Landscape: Life and Death in Great American Cities,” a blog post for the Unit. Among several others, her most recent publications are: “Post-71: Photographic Ambivalences, Archives, and the Construction of a National Identity of Bangladesh" (2021), “Re-Constructing ’71: The Visual Landscape of Bangladeshi Nationalism Now” (2021), and “Space to Breathe: George Floyd, BLM Plaza and the Monumentalization of Divided American Urban Landscapes” (co-authored, 2020). Nubras' dissertation is titled, "Architecture of the Land: Louis Kahn’s Assembly Building Complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh."

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