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Biography

Sonali Dhanpal is an architectural and urban historian of South Asia, Britain, and the world from the 1800s to the present, with a background as an architect and architectural conservationist in India and the United Kingdom. Her research examines the relationship between architecture, the histories of colonialism and capitalism, and the production (and reproduction) of race-, caste-, and class-based inequality. Dhanpal’s projects on land and property in colonial South Asia and housing in post-war Britain address questions rooted in art and architectural history about form, aesthetics, and representation, but do so with an interest in how they were dialectically shaped by the state (colonial and welfare), its legal institutions, and political economy. 

Dhanpal’s research been supported by the Paul Mellon Center for British Art, the Center for Canadian Architecture, The Society of Architectural Historians, The Society of Architectural Historians Great Britain, and The Institute of Historical Research (University of London), and has appeared in Grey Room, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Planning Perspectives, The Avery Review, and numerous edited volumes.

Her first book project, Rule of the Property Form: Caste, Capital and the Making of Bangalore, is a history of the ubiquitous detached house on a plot that Anthony D. King has famously called the bungalow. Her telling of this history is grounded in the emergence of Bangalore as a city in the 19th century, shaped by nominally sovereign princely rule and British colonial rule into the 20th century. Framing architectural history as a history of property, it develops the property form as the materialization of South Asia’s transition to capitalism, describing both the building and the plot. In arguing that the property form was the most durable architectural and urban legacy of colonial capitalism in South Asia, the book deepens how we understand caste as an infrastructure of capitalism. 

A second project, tentatively titled Welfare Architecture and Aesthetics: Building Consent and Countering Dissent in Britain after Empire, is an aesthetic, social, and intellectual history of post-war Britain (1950-1980). It aims to retell the history of Britain’s post-war construction boom and its subsequent decline through the aesthetic and political production of the “welfare state” in the aftermath of empire. Newer interests focus on the 19th-century rise of the Tata Corporation, specifically the design and planning of its philanthropic projects, and the long-durée history of the Archaeological Survey of India, the premier authority on archaeology, art, and architecture in South Asia from the 18th century to the present.

Before teaching at 91����, Dhanpal was the 2024-2026 Fellow at the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for American Architecture and the Society of Fellows at Columbia University's Heyman Center and the 2023-2024 Princeton Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities at Princeton University. In 2023, she completed her doctoral studies in architectural history and theory at Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape (SAPL) in the United Kingdom.

Dhanpal is interested in graduate students working in any area of modern architectural history, as broadly defined, from the 1800s to the present. She particularly welcomes those interested in questions of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism and can offer her expertise in South Asia, Britain and its empire. Applicants must have strong comparative and transnational historical and historiographical aspects to their archival research.

Recent publications

• “Caste, Capitalism and the City: Drawing Land into 'Racial' Regime of Property in Articulations of Global Capitalism: Race, Caste, and the City,” eds. Dhanpal, Sonali, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, & the Middle East (forthcoming 2026)
• “Cities of Minor Sovereignties” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Urban History, eds. Carl Nightingale, Mariana Dantas, and Alexia Yates, Oxford University Press (forthcoming 2026).
• “Housing Empire's Subjects: Moral Panics at the 'End of Empire' and Race in the British Welfare State.” Grey Room. (101): 102–127, 2025.
• “Race in the Garden: Eugenics and Utopian Planning.” In New Planning Histories. eds. Andres, L., Beebeejaun, Y., Rydin, Y, Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. 2024
• “The Making of a Model Town: Planning in a Princely City and the All-India Sanitary Conferences.” Planning Perspectives 38 (3): 467–97. 2023

Education

• PhD in Architectural History and Theory; School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, United Kingdom
• MA in International Conservation Studies (Historic Buildings); Department of Archaeology, University of York, United Kingdom.
• Bachelor of Architecture; Dayanada Sagar College of Architecture, India.

Honors and Awards

• Early Career Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University, London
• Research Fellow at the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal
• Fellow at the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for American Architecture and The Society of Fellows, Columbia University
• Princeton Mellow Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, at Princeton University
• Royal Historical Society Marshall Fellowship, Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Studies, University of London
• The inaugural recipient of the Forshaw PhD Scholarship, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University
• Departmental Award for Conservation Studies, University of York