About

Huma Gupta is the Aga Khan Assistant Professor in Islamic Architecture at MIT. As an architectural historian, urban policy expert, and filmmaker, she specializes in the history and theory of informality, forced migration, and biogenic architecture in the global south. Dr. Gupta’s first book project, The Architecture of Dispossession, theorizes the relationship between state-building and dispossession through architectural transformations of migrant reed and clay dwellings in 20th century Iraq. She holds a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture and a Master’s in City Planning from MIT. Her work has been published by the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, Yale University Press, Intellect Books, and Thresholds. Dr. Gupta’s courses include Decolonial Ecologies, Climate Futures, Cities Past, Dwelling & Building: Cities in the Global South, Earth, Reed & Water, Historiography of Islamic Architecture + Art, and Architecture & the Wealth of Nations. As a practitioner, she has worked on infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, municipal planning in Syria, eviction prevention and homelessness in the greater Boston area, and humanitarian response to housing needs for persons displaced due to climate, conflict, and development projects around the world. She is currently producing a feature documentary film titled ‘She Was Not Alone’ about a nomadic woman fighting to stay with her beloved animals in the rapidly disappearing Iraqi marshes. The film project, directed by Hussein al-Asadi, was selected in the 80th Venice Film Festival’s Final Cut Lab, Doha Film Institute’s First Cut Lab, and Red Sea Film Festival’s Souq, and is scheduled to premiere in 2024.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Literature
• Aesthetics
• Law
• Medicine
• Ancient history
• Art
• Operating system
• Geography
• Anthropology
• Virology

Selected publications

• ‘May Our Egos Die So That the World May Live’

  Journal of Architectural Education · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Operating system
  PublisherDOI

• Visual Artists, Technological Shock, and Generative AI

  2024-08-28 · 6 citations

  preprintOpen access

  The impact of generative AI (GenAI) programs on visual art is comparable to earlier historical moments of technological shock, when literary and visual artists grappled with unprecedented reproductive tools such as the printing press, photography, and cinema. Metabolizing the shock of those once radical inventions eventually yielded great bursts of artistic innovation. Yet, unlike those prior revolutions, the current one presents a deeper threat to artistic innovation by smoothing its source material into endless variants of seamless pastiche. By definition, the corpus of imagery currently being scraped for training already exists—it is overwhelmingly photographic, representational, and Western-hemispheric. As a result, algorithmic aesthetics visually echo the hundred-year-old art movement of Surrealism at its most banal. GenAI thus jeopardizes a singular function of visual artists in contemporary culture: to continuously innovate never-before-seen forms, artistic movements, styles, cognitive concepts, and theories of representation. Moreover, GenAI is a cultural technology. Since generative programs make secondary and tertiary materials by inputting their own outputs, they both intensify the bias found in the corpus and bury ever deeper the historical sources of that bias, neglecting significant future markets and constituencies who could be welcomed in to build richer archives with better metadata. We argue that more inclusive and transparent training sets, permeable models, and significant investment in what we call “public intelligence” can better shape the potential of GenAI tools, confronting technological shock in ways more likely to encourage rather than dampen artistic innovation for the public good.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dialogue with the Machine and Dialogue with the Art World: Evaluating Generative AI for Culturally-Situated Creativity

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-12-18 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access

  This paper proposes dialogue as a method for evaluating generative AI tools for culturally-situated creative practice, that recognizes the socially situated nature of art. Drawing on sociologist Howard Becker's concept of Art Worlds, this method expands the scope of traditional AI and creativity evaluations beyond benchmarks, user studies with crowd-workers, or focus groups conducted with artists. Our method involves two mutually informed dialogues: 1) 'dialogues with art worlds' placing artists in conversation with experts such as art historians, curators, and archivists, and 2)'dialogues with the machine,' facilitated through structured artist- and critic-led experimentation with state-of-the-art generative AI tools. We demonstrate the value of this method through a case study with artists and experts steeped in non-western art worlds, specifically the Persian Gulf. We trace how these dialogues help create culturally rich and situated forms of evaluation for representational possibilities of generative AI that mimic the reception of generative artwork in the broader art ecosystem. Putting artists in conversation with commentators also allow artists to shift their use of the tools to respond to their cultural and creative context. Our study can provide generative AI researchers an understanding of the complex dynamics of technology, human creativity and the socio-politics of art worlds, to build more inclusive machines for diverse art worlds.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Prelapsarian landscapes and post-diluvian politics in mid-century Iraqi art

  Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Aesthetics

  The 1950s was a decade marked by radical artistic, environmental and political transformations in Iraq. The decade began with an elite-driven programme of national development and ended in a popular anti-monarchic revolution on 14 July 1958. Between these competing visions of development and revolution, members of the Baghdad modern art scene negotiated between a drive towards institutionalization and state patronage with more radical critiques of the status quo. In 1950, for instance, the artist Faiq Hassan founded The Pioneers ( Ar-Ruwwād ) collective. It grew out of La Société Primitive, which Hassan originally established under the guiding principle that art should be taken outside the studio and into the streets. Their objective was to paint ‘directly from the surrounding environment’ (). But what exactly did Iraqi artists consider to be the environment ? This article addresses this question by examining the divergent modes of representation adapted by mid-century Iraqi artists to reflect their environmental imaginations. These imaginations ranged from romantic depictions of prelapsarian landscapes to devastating floods, migration and dispossession faced by the majority of the country’s poorer inhabitants who disproportionately bore the consequences of environmental catastrophes and interventions alike.

  PublisherDOI

• Rural Migrants, Smallpox, and Civic Surgery in 20th- Century Baghdad, Iraq

  Intellect Ltd. eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Medicine
  • Ancient history

  Epidemic Urbanism - Contagious Diseases in Global Cities; The recent pandemic has put into perspective the impact of epidemic illness on urban life and exposed the vulnerabilities of societies. Interdisciplinary case studies from across the globe explore what insights from the outbreak, experience and response to previous epidemics might inform our understanding of the current world. 150 b/w illus.

  PublisherDOI

• Staging Baghdad as a Problem of Development

  International Journal of Islamic Architecture · 2019-05-06 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines a cinematic artefact from 1957 titled The Housing Program of Iraq, which contains rare footage of sarifa (reed and mud) settlements inhabited by rural migrants in mid-century Baghdad. The film, which was never finished, was produced as a collaboration between the Greek architect Constantinos A. Doxiadis and the director Demetrios Gaziades, who shot and edited the footage between Baghdad and Athens. Through this film Doxiadis intended to complement the Doxiadis Associates’ (DA) entry for the Iraq National Housing Exhibition and also to promote the modern housing projects designed by DA. In this period, various statist actors used the representational medium of documentary film in an attempt to redefine the boundaries of Iraqi citizenship. This film, thus, offered a cinematic portal into an other Baghdad, which was staged as the problem of development. Subsequent scenes narrated the solution to these neighbourhoods and positioned a family in a modern low-income house to animate the film’s developmental fantasy. The film projected universal Iraqi home ownership as a form of citizenship where the house was an instrument to facilitate financial, legal, and social agreements between rural migrants and the Iraqi state. By interrogating the methodological question of how to assemble an archive of ephemeral and subaltern places, this essay suggests expanding our notion of historiographic evidence to understand the intertwined relationships between the politics of development and architecture, and their representation in media.

  PublisherDOI

• Encountering the Sonic Artifact in the Digital Archive

  Thresholds · 2019-05-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  May 01 2019 Encountering the Sonic Artifact in the Digital Archive Huma Gupta Huma Gupta HUMA GUPTA is a PhD candidate in History, Theory, and Criticism in the Department of Architecture at MIT. She is a fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Her dissertation is tentatively titled "The State Between Dwelling Building: Sarifa Settlements and the Formation of Iraq" Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Huma Gupta HUMA GUPTA is a PhD candidate in History, Theory, and Criticism in the Department of Architecture at MIT. She is a fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Her dissertation is tentatively titled "The State Between Dwelling Building: Sarifa Settlements and the Formation of Iraq" Online Issn: 2572-7338 Print Issn: 1091-711X © 2019 Huma Gupta2019Huma Gupta Thresholds (2019) (47): 119–127. https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00679 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Huma Gupta; Encountering the Sonic Artifact in the Digital Archive. Thresholds 2019; (47): 119–127. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00679 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThresholds Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2019 Huma Gupta2019Huma Gupta Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘Nostalgic Desire’: The Restoration of Dar ul-Aman Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan

  Thresholds · 2017-08-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  August 01 2017 'Nostalgic Desire': The Restoration of Dar ul-Aman Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan Huma Gupta Huma Gupta Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Huma Gupta Online Issn: 2572-7338 Print Issn: 1091-711X © 2017 Huma Gupta2017Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thresholds (2017) (45): 110–123. https://doi.org/10.1162/THLD_a_00010 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Huma Gupta; 'Nostalgic Desire': The Restoration of Dar ul-Aman Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan. Thresholds 2017; (45): 110–123. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/THLD_a_00010 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThresholds Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Huma Gupta2017Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Accountable to beneficiaries? : the modern development enterprise & its contractors at war : lessons on accountability from Afghanistan to inform the contracting reform agenda

  DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 2011-01-01

  dissertationOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, June 2011.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Matthew Ritchie

  University College London

  1 shared

• Rida Qadri

  Google (United States)

  1 shared

• Aroussiak Gabriellan

  1 shared

• Suheyla Takesh

  1 shared

• Caroline A. Jones

  1 shared

• Farbod Mehr

  1 shared

• Piotr Mirowski

  1 shared

• Emily Denton

  Google (United States)

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at Brandeis University
• Humanities Research Fellow at New York University-Abu Dhabi
• International Dissertation Research Fellow at the Social Sci…
• Selected in the 80th Venice Film Festival’s Final Cut Lab
• Selected in Doha Film Institute’s First Cut Lab