Opinions, Academic Insights, and Literary Critiques
In the article titled Global Homogenization of Public Space? A Comparison of “Western” and “Eastern” Contexts, authors Panjaitan, Pojani and Darchen provide a comprehensive view about public spaces in Southeast Asian cities, and how the differences in the public spheres in the Eastern world has led to an entirely different typology of public spaces. The […]
Seventy feet below ground level, at the bottom of Lower Manhattan’s bedrock, an engineering marvel resurfaced following the events of September 11. This was a massive void, known as “the bathtub,” occupying an area of sixteen acres, and was made possible due to a specialized foundation system. It was because of this unique base that […]
In the Introduction to Companion to Public Space, Vikas Mehta and Danilo Palazzo make one of the most important observations in the first paragraph, where they write about how private sectors often try to regulate access to public spaces to “limit dissent.” This suggests that any kind of difference in opinion, or protests for that […]
This week, I completed my summer internship at the Paul Revere House, one of the earliest historic house museums of the United States, located in the oldest building in downtown Boston. This was the first museum I had worked at, and I couldn’t have started my museum career at a better working environment. Being a […]
“Sometimes I feel like I titled this book Kittens and Rainbows, and then I wrote hell.” This quote pretty much sums up what the memoir by Maggie Smith is like. In brief chapters, with some being as short as a single sentence or a few words, Smith chronicles the end of her marriage, the painfully long […]
This July, American architect Michael Graves would have turned 90 years old. He was also a designer, an educator, a prominent figure who contributed to American postmodernist architecture, and an alumnus from the College of Applied Arts at the University of Cincinnati. To celebrate his legacy, and as part of my work at DAAP Library, […]
This semester, I worked part time at the library of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) at the University of Cincinnati, and the culmination of my work here involved curating and designing exhibits for displays within the library area. For one of those displays, I chose a collection of drawings and objects […]
Creative Careers in Museums by Jan E. Burdick was listed as a required reading for a museum internship that I am about to undertake this summer, and it turned out to be such an enjoyable book that went beyond its academic purposes. Not only does the book highlight different sections of a museum and the […]
Earlier this month, I presented a paper on the fetishization of female bodies in religious art from South Asia, at the Graduate Student Symposium, organized by University of Cincinnati’s School of Public and International Affairs. In my presentation, I spoke about the problematic way museum didactics are written about female figures in Hindu and Buddhist […]
One of the highlights for me this semester was presenting a lecture on modern architecture of Bangladesh to 100+ students at University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. This was part of a course on History of Modern Architecture, where I also worked as a TA throughout the semester. The biggest challenge […]