Arijit Sen
- Associate Professor, History
- Affiliated Professor, Urban Studies
Education
- PhD, University of California, Berkeley. 2002
- M Arch, Iowa State University, Ames. 1991
- B Arch, University of Bombay, Bombay. 1987
Office Hours
Teaching Schedule
Courses Taught
- HIST 715 - Research Methods in Local History
- URBSTD 728 - Urban Community Workshop
- HIST 404/G - Food as Historical Artifact
- HIST 701 - Graduate Internship in Public History
- Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School
Teaching Interests
- Urban and architectural history
- Housing and food justice (US)
- Material Culture
- Public history
- Environmental justice
- American cultural landscapes
- Community-engaged fieldwork
- Collaborative ethnography
Research Interests
- Public history and public humanities fieldwork
- Urban history and architectural history
- Material culture
- Collaborative ethnography
- American cultural landscapes
- Historic Preservation
- Immigration and diaspora studies
Related Activities
Founding Co-Director, Community Powered, Wisconsin Humanities
Lead, Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School and the Milwaukee Environmental Justice Lab
Partner, Climates of Inequality, Humanities Action Lab
Selected (Recent) Grants
Wisconsin Humanities Major Grant, October 2023, “Growing Resistance: Untold Stories of Milwaukee’s Community Guardians” Exhibit, MIAD, $9,986.00.
Humanities Action Lab, Climates of Inequality Project, NEH an Mellon Foundation Grants, $15,000
Participant, 2022-23 Sawyer Seminar on Reimagining the American Landscape, “Reimagining the American Landscape: Race and the Future of Public History,” Andrew Mellon Foundation funded seminar hosted by the University of Virginia.
Urban and Landscape History Writing Retreat, Oak Spring in Upperville, VA, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, September 8-12, 2021.
Imagining America’s LLI Stories of Change Case Study Project, A three-year action research project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Imagining America, ‘21-22.
Douglas Gillmor Theory Seminar and Lectureship, Urban Field School, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, University of Calgary, March 2021.
Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair, (declined due to COVID), Academic Excellence and Professional Excellence Award (Teaching), The Institute of International Education’s Council for International Exchange of Scholars (IIE/CIES), Kozhikode Field School, National Institute of Technology, Calicut, India, 2020-21.
Mellon Fellowships in Urban Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, and Collection, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C., Spring 2021.
UWM Advancing Research and Creativity (ARC) Award, “Restorative Ligaments: Histories and Spaces of Everyday Resistance against Injustice in Milwaukee’s Northside,” July 1, 2021 to December 30, 2022, $12,492
Biographical Sketch
Dr. Arijit Sen is a historian of everyday places and ordinary people. He examines the cultural landscapes of immigrant communities and interprets cities from the bottom up by engaging the voices and histories of urban communities traditionally ignored in official narratives. In 2022 he was inducted as a Fellow in the Society of Architectural Historians.
Sen has directed public history and preservation fieldwork projects in Milwaukee, Chicago, Calgary, and New Orleans. Since 2012 he has directed the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures field school, a public humanities project that engages students, scholars, and community members in a collaborative exploration and documentation of the history and heritage of Milwaukee’s neighborhoods. The field school is currently partnering with the Newark-based Humanities Action Lab to contribute to “Climates of Inequality," a traveling exhibit on environmental justice.
Sen has served as a co-director for the 2022-23 pilot year of Community Powered project, a state-wide Public Humanities initiative of Wisconsin Humanities. He has previously served on the board of directors of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Vernacular Architecture Forum, as a contributor to the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture’s Knowledge Construction Workshop, and as a fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the Center for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota, and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Harvard University.
Sen has published in journals such as the Winterthur Portfolio, Food & Foodways, South Asian History and Culture, Buildings & Landscapes, and the Journal of Society of Architectural Historians; he has coedited Landscapes of Mobility: Culture, Politics and Placemaking (Ashgate Publishers, UK, 2013 with Jennifer Johung) and Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City (Indiana University Press, 2014 with Lisa Silverman).