Jindal School of Art and Architecture

Biography

Dr. Ekta Chauhan is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of history, heritage, anthropology, and visual culture, with a deep interest in how communities remember, narrate, and inhabit space. She holds a Ph.D. in World Heritage Studies from the Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus (Germany), where her doctoral research examined the role of local communities in shaping the management and experience of cultural heritage tourism in Delhi. Her academic method, which she fondly describes as the perfect khichdi, brings together critical heritage studies, anthropology, urban studies and comparative cultural analysis to investigate how everyday life and memory are woven into the built environment.

Dr. Chauhan’s upcoming book, Sheher Mein Gaon (Penguin Random House, 2025), draws on over a decade of oral history work to trace the cultural and historical transformation of Delhi through its urban villages. Based on her long-running archival project Dilli ki Khirki, the book challenges conventional city histories by centring voices from its rural-urban fringes, offering a rich and intimate portrait of changing landscapes, livelihoods, and identities.

In addition to her work in Delhi, she is deeply interested in rural-urban interactions and how they shape contemporary Indian cities. Her current research expands this inquiry to the villages surrounding the JGU campus in Sonipat, exploring how agrarian life, migration, and informal economies intersect with expanding urban infrastructures.

She brings this rich field-based perspective into her teaching at the Jindal School of Art and Architecture, where she encourages students to explore cities through storytelling, fieldwork, and creative methods of representation and analysis—from maps and photographs to archives and oral narratives.

Beyond the classroom, Dr. Chauhan believes in the power of accessible knowledge and is an avid writer for digital media and research platform to make research accessible to wider audiences. When not immersed in books, she can be found exploring heritage sites, watching old Bollywood films, experimenting with baking and pour-over coffee, or (enthusiastically) trying to lift weights. Her one academic pet peeve: people who scribble in borrowed books.