Nushelle de Silva received her PhD in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022. She holds a SMArchS, also from MIT, and a BA in Architecture from Princeton University.
Her work is broadly concerned with how culture is defined and deployed to further imperialism in the present. Past research topics include U.S. industrial exhibits selling capitalist development in non-aligned countries, dubious museum policies for accruing and disposing of collections, distortions of heritage discourse to maintain ethnic hegemony, and the institutionalization of counter-culture movements to majoritarian ends.
Her dissertation, "Moving Experiences: Traveling Museum Exhibitions and the Infrastructures of Cultural Globalization," examines how the ambitions of international organizations dedicated to cultural peacebuilding spatially reorganized museums to prioritize object exchange through traveling exhibitions in the mid-twentieth century and argues that the uneven globalization facilitated by these exhibitions still augments rather than alleviates the coloniality of museums.
Her doctoral research has been supported by the Winterthur Museum, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Design History Society, among others.