Manu Sobti

Dr. Manu P. Sobti serves as Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Deputy Director of Higher Degree by Research in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Queensland. Prior to joining UQ, he was Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 2006 to 2016. There, he directed the India Winterim Program from 2008 to 2015, partnering with architecture schools in Ahmedabad, Delhi, and Chandigarh; established a research-focused program in Uzbekistan involving field studies at sites, archives, and cultural landscapes; co-coordinated the Building-Landscapes-Cultures concentration within the doctoral program from 2011 to 2013; and chaired the PhD Committee from 2014 to 2016, leading the Urban Histories and Contested Geographies research consortium. Sobti earned a B.Dipl.Arch. from the School of Architecture-CEPT in Ahmedabad, India; an SMarchS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA; and a Ph.D. from the College of Architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA. He has also served as a United States Department of State Fulbright Senior Specialist Scholar.

A landscape historian and urban interlocutor of the Global South, Sobti's research specializations encompass South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, with a focus on borderland transgressions intertwined with human mobilities, indigeneities, and narratives of passage across liminal sites. His approach emphasizes land-centered, deep place histories as de-colonizing processes challenging top-down narratives of borders and nation states. Sobti's scholarship has received support from numerous funding bodies, including the Graham Foundation, Architectural Association, Fulbright Foundation, Aga Khan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and others, along with seven research fellowships at institutions worldwide. He is a nominated Expert Member of the ICOMOS-ICIP International Committee on the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites. Key publications include his book Urban Form & Space in the Islamic City: A Study of Morphology & Formal Structures in the City of Bhopal (Central India) (1993); edited volume Chandigarh Re-think: Transforming Ruralities and Edge(ness) in Global Urbanities (2017); and chapters such as "Beyond Water: Step Wells and Community Hydraulics in Modern India" (2024), "Re-imagining Eurasia: Past Flatland Stories of Urban and Landscape Heritage" (2020), "Eurasia’s Historical Space of Palimpsest—Desert, Border, Riparian and Steppe" (2019), "Persian Civitas: Revised Readings on Networked Urbanities and Suburban Hinterlands" (2016), and "Mobile Urbanism: Tent Cities in Medieval European Travel Writings" (2015).