Fatema Tasmia: Recipient of Paul Mellon Centre’s Research Support Grant

The History of Art & Architecture congratulates our very own Fatema Tasmia for her most recent accomplishment.

Fatema Tasmia has been awarded the Paul Mellon Centre Research Support Grant (Autumn 2025) for the project “Tropical Modernism in South Asia: British Pedagogy, Regional Praxis, and Transnational Exchange, 1950s-1980s.” The research examines how climatic design pedagogy and modern construction ideas circulated between Britain and South Asia in the postcolonial decades and how South Asian architects, builders, and institutions reinterpreted these frameworks through regional materials, labor practices, and climate-responsive design strategies. Archival research will be conducted in UK-based collections, including the Architectural Association (AA) Archives and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Collections. The findings will directly support her PhD dissertation, which reframes tropical modernism as a process of regionalization shaped by climate, materiality, and construction practice in postcolonial South Asia.