Rina Priyani

Rina Priyani is an RPE Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Architectural History, School of Architecture. Her research focuses on the racialization of urban space and landscape in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. She is currently working on a book project entitled Building Bandung: Colonialism, Ethnic Identities and Architectural Practices in Indonesia, which examines the efforts of Indonesian intellectuals and visionaries of the postcolonial world who have been reinventing the city of Bandung in West Java, rupturing it from its colonial origin. This research foregrounds class, ethnicity, gender, and race in Bandung’s urban transformation that grappled with the legacies of late Dutch colonialism, Japanese occupation, and Indonesian post-independence. She traced this lineage to the important moment in global history when the city hosted the anticolonial Afro-Asian or Asian-African Conference, known as the "Bandung Conference," in 1955 and became a symbol of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Priyani obtained her PhD in Architecture: History, Theory and Society from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Master of Engineering and Bachelor of Architecture from the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia. Prior to joining UVA, she taught at Bandung Institute of Technology and UC Berkeley.