Caitlin Blanchfield

Overview

Caitlin Blanchfield is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History of Art department specializing in architectural and landscape histories. Her research addresses the role of modernist land management and design practices in projects of dispossession and colonization in North America and across the reaches of US empire, and focuses on how Indigenous material cultures and built environments challenge colonial systems and assert political relationships to place. She is currently working on her book Unsettling Public Lands: Indigenous Sovereignty, Scientific Architecture, and the Question of Use, which offers a critical reading of modern architecture’s instrumentalization in late twentieth century expropriation of Indigenous lands in places like astronomical observatories and research stations, while centering the everyday architectures of Indigenous resistance.

Her recently published co-authored book Significant Impact: Contesting Surveillance Infrastructure on Tohono O’odham Je’ved (Actar, 2026) brings together stories, essays, and narrative cartography in a counter environmental assessment to document and describe the effects of surveillance infrastructure on the Tohono O’odham Nation, advocate against militarized border technologies, and challenge common protocols of environmental review. Other collaborative work includes a community engaged oral history and exhibition project on the modern treaty between the Gwich’in Nation and the Canadian government, and the exhibition and publication project Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image (Columbia University Press and The Shed, 2019).

Blanchfield is a founding editor of Wedge: Architectural Research, Practice, and Pedagogy, and was an editor of The Avery Review (2014-2024), a journal of critical essays on the built environment. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, and Hotıì ts’eeda.