When she received the call, emotions washed over Preeti Chopra in waves: shock, disbelief, great joy.
“I had to hold onto something and sit down,” recalls Chopra, Professor of Visual Studies, South Asian Art and Architecture in the Department of Art History, who received word last week that she is a recipient of the 2022-23 Rome Prize. Specifically, Chopra has won the Suzanne Deal Booth Rome Prize, which is awarded for work in historic preservation and conservation. One of 38 American and four Italian scholars to receive the prestigious international award from the American Academy in Rome (AAR), Chopra will spend the next academic year on the Academy’s eleven-acre campus on the Janiculum Hill in Rome, starting in September 2022.
“It is a great honor, and a great gift,” says Chopra. “To be among such a diverse group of colleagues, to speak and interact with scholars from fields as varied as medieval studies, or music, or literature—the unexpected can happen. It feels like a bit of a dream, really.”
Chopra studies and writes about colonial architecture, with a particular focus on India. She began training in the 1980s as an architect.
“I had not done much writing in my program up until the thesis required for graduation,” she recalls, of her undergraduate studies in architecture in Ahmedabad, India. “As I was researching and writing, I realized: If you are in any kind of field that is technical – like a professional degree program – you need to think about how we are developing as humans and as society.”
Chopra went on to pursue graduate degrees in landscape architecture, city and regional planning, as well as architecture, at the University of California-Berkeley. Here, she happened to take a class on colonialism. It was there that discussions of colonialism and post-colonialism began to permeate discourse amongst some students and faculty in her program, with what Chopra describes as “a density of thinking.” Her own work focused on the legacies of French colonialism in India.
“For my PhD, I decided to look at something different—the city of Bombay,” she says. “I wanted to study how the publics there inhabit urban space.”
What began to emerge, in her books and articles, were interesting, layered takes on the legacies of British rule in India. Through her examination of public buildings and urban spaces, Chopra saw connections between what the British wanted (clean, Gothic-revival buildings) and what Indian elites saw as important, too (spaces that served their own communities while serving the greater good). She explores the role that philanthropy played in colonialist architecture and planning—and how British Bombay was actually a collaboration of the colonial government and the Indian and European mercantile and industrial elite, which created a shared landscape for Bombay’s citizens.
She acknowledges that Gothic architecture means something very different for a Parsi architect than it does to a British one. But her argument is for preservation of colonial buildings in order to preserve knowledge of the past and demonstrate how different interests and motives don’t have to stand in the way of building something together.
“Bombay is one of the best examples of the Gothic Revival in the world,” she says. “Educational institutions, railway stations, libraries, post offices, courts: much of it is Gothic. The British can have all kinds of ideas about what Gothic architecture meant. But for Indians, the architecture means ‘this is the joint public realm.’ It’s for the larger public. In a way you can read the space and the structures as somewhat belonging to everyone. It’s a style that’s uniting everyone.”
Chopra says these are buildings which were built through joint enterprise, through philanthropy, and that there is no need to look at them through one lens.
“Sometimes people are angry with these colonial buildings, and sometimes they are proud of them,” she says. “There can be different interpretations. Colonialism is very complicated.”
For her year in Rome, Chopra will pursue a project she has titled, “Historic Preservation, British Monuments, and the Legacy of Ancient Rome in Modern India.” She will be looking at how Roman architecture’s pervasive influence both reflects and shapes the aspirations a country may have for itself. She will be making the argument for preserving India’s diverse heritage (in the face of calls by the forces of Hindutva to destroy and marginalize monuments that celebrate that diversity). She will be grappling with the past, in order to understand what is happening in the present.
Rome Prize winners are selected annually by independent juries of distinguished artists and scholars through a national competition. Nationwide, the Rome Prize competition received 909 applications, representing 47 US states and territories and 19 different countries. This group of Rome Prize winners is among the most diverse in the Academy’s history. Approximately 46 percent of the winners identify as persons of color.
“These fellowships are transformative, and we look forward to seeing the ways this experience is translated in the work to come,” says Mark Robbins, AAR President and CEO.