Caitlin Blanchfield

Caitlin Blanchfield is a historian of architecture and landscape whose work examines the infrastructures of settler colonialism and material practices of resistance. 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, as well as the anticolonial architectures that unsettle them. Blanchfield received her Ph.D. in architectural history and theory from Columbia University and was a 2024–25 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University.

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-20th-century expropriation of Indigenous lands, while narrating a built environment history of Indigenous resistance. Other work includes collaborative investigations into the impacts of border infrastructures on Indigenous lands and multimedia projects on the management of architectural value, including the coauthored book Significant Impact: Contesting Surveillance Infrastructure on Indigenous Lands (Actar, 2025) and the collaborative exhibition and publication project Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image (Columbia University Press and The Shed, 2019).

Blanchfield was a founding editor of the Avery Review and served on the editorial board for the Journal of Architectural Education. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. She holds an M.S. in Critical Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University and a B.A. in history from Oberlin College.