SoA faculty member Shivani Shedde won the 2026 David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award from the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) for her dissertation “A World Beyond the State: Architecture and Culture in Afro-Asian Solidarity 1947-1977.”
The award recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations in architectural history that demonstrate extensive primary research, original analysis, and exceptional writing.
Shedde teaches in the Graduate Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design department and in the Undergraduate Architecture program. Her dissertation weaves together a history of conferences over three decades, moving between India, Singapore, Tanzania, Algeria, Lebanon, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique to trace the connections and disjuncts between people, institutions, and geographies. It shows how various anti-colonial actors oriented discourses of monument, labor, cartography, and housing towards decolonial futures, and positioned architecture less as a built “form” that obeyed the logics of “territory” than as a conceptual tool that reflected emergent attitudes towards collective mobilization beyond the state.