Stella Nair

Trained as an architect and architectural historian, Stella Nair has conducted field-based research in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru and the United Staes, with ongoing work in the South-Central Andes.  Her transdisciplinary scholarship explores architecture as a cultural, ecological, and sensory system (rather than a bounded set of monuments), with a particular focus on ephemerality, Indigenous knowledge, and gender. Her work is grounded in a cultural landscape approach that uses a multisensory methodology, integrating material analysis with acoustics, ecology, structural engineering (including waste water systems), experimental reconstruction, and sustained collaboration with local communities. Across this work, Nair has helped shift the study on early Andean architecture from descriptive documentation toward a more expansive account of architecture as lived, performed, and environmentally embedded knowledge.

Publications:

Nair’s publications span the architecture of sensorial environments, ecological and ephemeral building systems, and contemporary questions of heritage and preservation. Across these varied contexts, her work consistently challenges disciplinary boundaries by treating the built environment not as static object but as an evolving system of material practice, environmental adaption, and social meaning.

Her first major monograph, The Stones of Tiahuanaco: A Study of Architecture and Construction (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2013) is co-authored with Jean Pierre Protzen and is a foundational study of Tiahuanaco stone-working practices. Rather than treating monumental architecture as symbolic form alone, the book explores the intellectual and technical processes of construction, revealing Indigenous building practices as highly sophisticated systems of facture, material science, and engineering knowledge. Her second monograph, At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero (University of Texas Press, 2015), examines how Inca royal estates organized space, movement, and landscape to produce imperial authority. The book reframes Inca architecture as an active political technology— one that structures perception, ritual, and social relations—rather than a passive backdrop to empire.  

Nair’s third book, The Forgotten Canopy: Rethinking Ephemeral Architecture, Ecology, and Imperialism (University of Toronto Press, under contract), is co-edited with Paul Niell and advances a major reorientation in architectural history by centering forms of building that have been systematically overlooked because of their organic and impermanent materials.  Bringing together Indigenous, African, and African descendent architectural practices in the Americas and Atlantic world, the volume reframes the built environment as deeply ecological, contingent, and materially plural, challenging long standing assumptions about permanence as the defining conditions of architectural significance. Her fourth book, Inca Architecture: A Women’s World extends this trajectory by reinterpreting the Inca built environment through gendered space, landscape, labor, and authority.  By foregrounding the role of women, Nair demonstrates the central role females played in shaping, using, and giving meaning to the Inca built environment, fundamentally revising conventional accounts of Inca architecture, gender dynamics, and political organization. For this work, Nair has received the “Research Excellence Award” from the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.  

Fellowships and Honors

Nair is currently a Senior Fellow of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard University) and a core participant in the interdisciplinary project  “Sound, Space, and the Aesthetic of the Sublime” (Templeton Religious Trust) directed by Jonathan Berger (Stanford University). Her research has been supported by major fellowships and grants from institutions such as the American Academy of Rome, the American Philosophical Association, the Center for the Study of the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art), Dumbarton Oaks, the Fulbright Institute, the Getty Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, the National Humanities Center, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Among her recognized contributions is the article “Localizing Sacredness, Difference, and Yachacuscamcani in a Colonial Andean Painting” selected as one of Art Bulletin‘s “greatest hits” representing  the journal’s most significant scholarship over the past century. 

Laboratories and Working Groups

Nair directs the Andean Laboratory and the Architecture laboratory at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, supporting postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate research on Andean and architectural topics at UCLA. These laboratories emphasize experimental and collaborative approaches to Andean studies and the global built environment, integrating field documentation, material analysis, digital reconstruction and acoustic based inquiry to individual research projects.  

Nair also co-founded and advises several interdisciplinary working groups on campus, including the Andean Working Group, which convenes regional and international scholars for lectures and discussions on Andean studies; the Architecture Working Group, which brings together scholars of the global built environment; and with Kevin Terraciano, the Indigenous Material and Visual Culture Reading Group, which fosters cross-disciplinary dialogue on Indigenous material practices across the early modern America. 

Appointments

Stella Nair is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History. She is also Core Faculty in the Archaeology Interdepartmental Program and the Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies at UCLA. Nair serves on the Governance Board for the Center for Global Antiquity. and is affiliate Faculty with the American Indian Studies Center, the CMRS-Center for Early Global Studies, and the Latin American Institute.

Professor Nair is currently not accepting new graduate students.