Mrinalini Rajagopalan

Mrinalini (Mina) Rajagopalan is a historian of the built environment and is particularly interested in the impact of colonialism and nationalism on the landscapes of modern India. Her most recent book, Marks She Made: The Art and Architecture of Begum Samru (Manchester University Press, 2026) focuses on the artistic and built works of Begum Samru—a wealthy dowager who rose from humble beginnings to become a military commander and independent ruler in nineteenth-century North India. Portraits and buildings were key diplomatic tools employed by Begum Samru to establish alliances with powerful male leaders across the world. Rajagopalan narrates this story from a feminist location, a location that allows her to simultaneously deploy and deconstruct archival evidence, to experiment with citation practices, and to trouble traditional chronologies. See below for the Open Access link to the Marks She Made.

A previous monograph Building Histories: The Archival and Affective Lives of Five Monuments in Modern Delhi (University of Chicago Press, 2016) traces the modern lives of five medieval monuments in India’s capital city, Delhi, and brings attention to their contested histories, unexpected uses, and ideological appropriations by state and non-state actors. This book received the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians in 2018.

In daydreaming about her next project, Rajagopalan oscillates between writing a history of the architecture commissioned by the Tata Corporation during India's long twentieth-century or an even longer and ecologically motivated history of her native city of Bombay told through the lens of sea, soil, and steel.

At Pitt, Rajagopalan teaches the first part of the global survey of architecture; and offers other courses on the built environment in Western contexts and the Global South. As part of the department’s anti-racist initiatives, she has also developed an undergraduate seminar called “Black Built America: Architectures of Black Resistance in the United States”. Her service to the discipline includes being book review editor (Asia, Africa, and Europe post 1750) editor for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

Before coming to Pitt, Rajagopalan held fellowships at Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. She holds a professional undergraduate degree in architecture and practiced for four years in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Ahmedabad, India where she worked for noted architect and Pritzker laureate Balkrishna V. Doshi.

Rajagopalan welcomes queries from prospective PhD students interested in pursuing histories of the built environment as it intersects with questions of imperialism and nationalism, and gender, race, and other intersectional identities, in the global South.