BIO

Dilruba Ferdosu Shuvra is an Adjunct Assistant Professor and a Doctoral Student in the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). She currently moderates the Special Training Internship Program and teaches the course ARCH 190 Nature & Architecture. She did her Master's in Human Settlement (MaHS) from K U Leuven, Belgium, and her Bachelor in Architecture (B.Arch) from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). She is also an architect and was the Lead Architect in the Women’s Social Architecture Project of OXFAM-Bangladesh (WASH sector) at Rohingya Refugee Camps, Cox’s Bazar. She has received the prestigious fellowship for the NYU Cities Collaborative-Mellon Summer Institute on Urbanism, 2022, and the VAF Ambassadors Award at the VAF 2023 Annual Conference in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Her research interests include alternative pedagogies of space-making, cultural landscape, architectural history, humanitarian landscape, vernacular architecture, r-urbanism, and de-urbanism. Her research looks into the history of weaving Jamdani in Bangladesh and explores how a specific geographical location and landscape setting influenced the practice of Jamdani weaving. The study further examines the relationship between the art of Jamdani weaving and its impact on human living spaces and how, over time, economic and environmental changes impacted the traditional practices of weaving Jamdani, the morphology of the weavers’ homesteads, socio-economic dynamics, and community identity within Jamdani weavers' villages in Bangladesh.