About

Dr. Kush Patel (they/them) heads the Master of Arts (MA) Program at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology in Bengaluru, India, where they also serve as Associate Professor and Course Leader for the MA Contemporary Art Practice, and as Director and Steward of a digital humanities (DH) research and pedagogy space called The Just Futures Co-lab. Their areas of scholarly practice intersect with the fields of Architectural History and Theory, Contemporary Art; Digital Humanities; Public Humanities; Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies; Critical Librarianship; and Critical Pedagogy. They are an editorial collective member of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP) and a social justice pedagogies topic editor for Reviews in DH. They also serve on the advisory board of QAMRA (Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection, and Activism) and are a founding member of the transnational Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed Collective.

Prior to joining Srishti Manipal, Dr. Patel held faculty positions as Academic Excellence Chair and Associate Professor of Architecture and Humanities at Avani Institute of Design in Calicut, Kerala; and “alt-ac” positions as Associate Faculty Librarian of Digital Pedagogy at Hatcher Graduate Library, as LSA Adjunct Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Humanities, and as Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Director of Academic Programming at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities and Humanities Collaboratory in Ann Arbor.

Dr. Patel completed their Ph.D. in Architecture from the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, where they researched issues of participatory politics, narrative building, and social production of space in the French radical architectural works of the “post-68” period. They have served as graduate student Public Humanities Fellow with Rackham’s Program in Public Scholarship, as Engaged Pedagogy Initiative Fellow with LSA’s Office of Community-Engaged Academic Learning, as Mellon Public Humanities Summer Fellow at the U-M Detroit Center, and as Project Assistant in the Art and Architecture Special Collections. Dr. Patel is a registered architect in India and they hold professional degrees with gold medal distinction in Architecture and Urban Design from South Gujarat University, Surat and CEPT University, Ahmedabad respectively, as well as a Master of Science in Architectural Design Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.