History of Art and Architecture

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Pamudu Tennakoon

PhD Candidate, Visiting Lecturer Fall 2024
Pamudu_Tennakoon@brown.edu
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Research Interests Colonial Architecture, Postcolonial space and Colonial Architecture, Colonial Architecture in South Asia
Dissertation Decolonization and Ruination: Rewriting Colonial Architecture from Rubble in Contemporary Colombo
Committee Members Itohan Osayimwese, Holly Shaffer, Lauren Yapp, and Lilian Chee
Office Hours Thursdays, 2-4 pm, List 408

Biography

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, where I am also pursuing a MA in Anthropology.

Sparked by the recent demolition of a colonial shophouse complex in Colombo, Sri Lanka, my dissertation, titled “Decolonization and Ruination: Rewriting Colonial Architecture from Rubble in Contemporary Colombo,” explores the afterlives of colonial buildings. 

Overall, my work combines ethnography, architectural history, heritage studies, and ruin theory to reveal the concrete ways in which people across the global south understand, rewrite, and negotiate their identities in relation to their colonial pasts amidst ongoing processes of architectural destruction. This work has been supported by the Social Sciences Research Council, the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, and Society of Architectural Historians.

 My published work can be found in Architecture Beyond Europe and has been presented at the conferences of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Asian Studies Association of Australia, and the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand.