School of Architecture College of Architecture + Planning

Shundana Yusaf, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Utah. Her scholarship juxtaposes postcolonial approaches to writing history with sound and media studies, framing each as a force of globalization. She is currently working on a book entitled The Resonant Tomb: A Feminist History of Medieval to Post Modern Sufi Shrines in Pakistan. The first detailed account of the intimate connection between space, sound and women in the mausolea of Sufi (Muslim mystics) saints, this book frames sound as a medium of construction, knowledge and experience. The study is funded by Fulbright and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. She has previously published Broadcasting Buildings: Architecture on the Wireless 1927-1945 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). It is exploration of architecture in the age of radio, probing sound as a medium of oral discourse. Research for it was supported, among others, by an award from Paul Mellon Foundation. SAH Archipedia: Utah’s 100 Most Important Architectural Sites (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016-2019) looks at the interface of space from oral societies to digitally networked white settler colonial political order, where sound structures cosmological and anthropocentric world views. Its fieldwork was sponsored by several UROP awards at the University of Utah.    

Yusaf has previously taught at Pratt Institute in New York, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Albany, and H.ECO College in Peshawar University. She has studied architecture at National College of Arts, Lahore in Pakistan, and architectural history at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton University (PhD 2011) in the United States.  

She teaches undergraduate surveys in global histories of architecture, research methods for designers and studio. At Utah, she is involved in a pedagogic initiative called Decolonizing Architectural Pedagogy.  As part of this direction, she is working with a team of indigenous and other postcolonial architectural practitioners on a sweat equity architecture and infrastructure delivery system in Navajo Nation called Nááts’ílid Initiative. In teaching, she braids her expertise on Islamic architecture and epistemologies of the south with the Eurocentrism of architectural education. Conducted with colleagues at the College of Architecture and Planning, this work has leading to new curricular guidelines, testing them in syllabi, reading lists, teaching, and refining them in successive years as teaching kits. Shared through a creative commons license, its open source platform for digital scholarship will be maintained by digital librarians at the Marriot Library. 

She is a member of the Asia Center and the Center of Religion at the University of Utah and a founding co-editor of the peer reviewed Dialectic: A Journal of School of Architecture, University of Utah that connects architectural history to concerns within architectural education and professional practice. She is also a contributing member of Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC). Together with three other colleagues, she has developed an open-source teaching kit for an undergraduate survey course on the history of world architecture.