Farhan Karim

Bangladesh

Farhan Karim is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Kansas University. Prior to joining the faculty, Karim taught at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) and the University of Asia Pacific. Karim received a PhD in architectural history from the University of Sydney, Australia. He earned his bachelors and masters degrees in architecture from the BUET.

Two historiographic agendas that shaped his research and teachings are to construct a global architectural history from the micro narrations of geopolitically segregated nation-states, and to examine architectural history from an interdisciplinary perspective of cultural transformation. His PhD thesis Global Transference of Architectural Modernism: India between 1937 and 1959 studies an array of colonial and postcolonial home exhibitions in which, he argues, the emerging notion of third world modernism were entangled with a desire for universal modernism. By studying the formation, idealization, and representation of third world modernism, his research situates architectural history within the cold war cultural politics in South Asia.

Source: University of Kansas website