Dr. Arijit Sen is an architect and vernacular architecture historian who writes, teaches, and studies everyday places and ordinary people. His research includes studies of the architecture of South Asian immigrant communities in Northern California, New York, and Chicago. He has worked on post-disaster reconstruction and community-engaged design in the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans and has directed public history and preservation fieldwork projects in Milwaukee. Sen’s academic and research background is in architectural history, social, cultural and behavioral analysis of the built environment, and American cultural landscape studies.
Currently an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee with an honorary appointment with the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin Madison, Dr. Sen cofounded the multi-campus based Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures area of doctoral research on architecture and cultural landscapes. He served on the board of directors of the Society of Architectural Historians (2016-19) and the Vernacular Architecture Forum (2015-18, 2006-10), and as a fellow at humanities centers such as the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the Center for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota.
Sen has presented his work on immigrant spaces at multiple international forums including the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture’s Knowledge Construction Workshop and the John E. Sawyer Seminar in the Study of Comparative Cultures at the University of Washington, Seattle. Since 2012 he has directed the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures field school, a participatory action-research project that engages students, scholars, and community members in a collaborative exploration and documentation of the history and heritage of Milwaukee’s neighborhoods. This fieldwork project received the American Association for State and Local History Award of Merit, multiple Wisconsin Humanities Council major grants, and was recognized by the National Humanities Alliance. The field school is currently partnering with the Newark-based Humanities Action Lab to contribute to a traveling exhibit on environmental justice.
