Chelsea Spencer
2025-27 Buell Research and Teaching Fellow
Project: "The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building"
While at the Buell, Spencer will work on her current book project, The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building. This work, which builds on Spencer’s dissertation, traces how building became contracting in the United States during the nineteenth century. General contractors dismantled the world of craft building and reconstituted it as the modern construction industry, thus laying the foundations of modern American architecture by operating at the inflection point between projection and materialization, paper and concrete. General contractors offered their investment-minded clients a completed building, for a fixed price, on a guaranteed schedule. Unearthing the ideological and institutional foundations of today’s construction industry, the study reveals how nineteenth-century thinking about freedom, value, and risk shaped the architectural building contract and the limits of the architecture profession.
Biography: Chelsea Spencer is an architectural historian and editor. Her research examines the practice and production of architecture—broadly construed—in the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on architecture’s interactions with technical media, law, and economic life. Spencer received a PhD in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture from MIT, an MDes from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a BA from Emory University. Before joining Columbia she was a CERCL postdoctoral fellow in architecture at Rice University. She has taught writing at the Pratt Institute and was previously the managing editor of Log. Her writing can be found in Grey Room, Places, and Log, among others.
Sonali Dhanpal
2024-26 Buell Research and Teaching Fellow
Project: “Caste and the City”
While at the Buell, Dhanpal will draw from her dissertation to work on “Caste and the City: Spatial Politics in Colonial and Princely Bangalore,” a project that examines the persistence of caste in urban South Asia. Destabilizing the myth of monolithic colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent, the book will offer a close spatial analysis of a princely capital city, Bangalore, in the critical decades between 1880 and 1920. Far from disappearing, caste power hardened onto new regimes of property, labor, and control. By focusing on housing and on land reform that came after pressure mounted for the exhibition of monumental colonial/princely power, the study shows how rentier capital materialized caste in built form by analyzing the third plague pandemic, the rise of urban landed castes in state politics, and missionaries as unlikely Dalit salvationists. Dhanpal will also begin work on her second project, “Empire Comes Home: Housing Race Relations in Britain,” which intends to bring colonial legacies of the welfare state into conversation with the vast scholarship on the architect-planners who led the postwar construction boom in Britain (1950-1980).
Biography: Sonali Dhanpal is an architect, a built heritage conservationist, and a historian of modern architecture and urbanism who specializes in histories of colonialism, capitalism, and inequality from the 1800s to the present. She earned a Bachelor’s in Architecture from the Dayananda Sagar School of Architecture, an M.A. in Conservation Studies from the University of York, and a PhD in Architectural History and Theory from Newcastle University. Her research has been supported by a number of awards and fellowships, including from the Institute of Historical Research at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London; the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art; the Society of Architectural Historians; and the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. Her work has appeared in the journal Planning Perspectives and the edited volume New Planning Histories.