Curt Gambetta

His second book project, Fieldwork After Modernism, examines the use of firsthand observation in research about the built environment by architects, architectural historians, artists, photographers, and others during the 1970s and 1980s. The study concentrates on research methods, fieldwork technologies, and documentary practices in different sites of development and abandonment, including postindustrial landscapes in Buffalo, New York, self-built housing in Brazil and Zambia, and heritage sites in South India. It analyzes reports, fieldnotes, drawings, photographs, and narratives of fieldwork to demonstrate how fieldwork practitioners differentiated their practice from histories of knowledge making in modernism and their deep entanglement with colonial power. But in closely examining the methods, technologies, and labor of fieldwork, the project shows how practices of firsthand observation encountered new structures of power and knowledge, such as the complicity of fieldwork with neoliberal financial institutions.

Prior to Dartmouth, he was a Visiting Critic at the Cornell University School of Architecture, Art, and Planning (2021-2023), the Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning (2011–2012), and a teaching fellow at Woodbury University in Los Angeles (2012–2013). During the 2000's, he was a resident of the Sarai Program at CSDS in New Delhi and collaborated with scholars at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore on a symposium and edited journal issue about the politics, history, and cultural life of streets in Indian cities. He is currently Faculty Coordinator for the Conversations on South Asia series convened by the South Asian Studies Collective at Dartmouth.