Vimalin Rujivacharakul

Biography

Professor Vimalin Rujivacharakul teaches History of Art and Architecture at the University of Delaware in the United States. She also concurrently holds the 2021-2024 Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture, Tsinghua University in China, and is a lifetime fellow of Clare Hall, University Cambridge. She researches and publishes on architectural history and historiography, material culture and object studies, history of cartography, and history of global collecting. Among her publications are Architecturalized Asia (CHOICE Outstanding Book); Liang Sicheng and the Temple of Buddha's Light (China Classic series, the Ministry of Education, China), and Collecting China: The World, China, and A Short History of Collecting which became the ground for the 2017 workshop that she co-directed at Winterthur Museum for the National Museum of Asian Art's Chinese Object Stu​dy. (Listen to the workshop podcasts). In 2022, she completed a three-year collaboration in which she researched and taught seminars on art and early modern cartography (16th-18th century); the project produced research videos by students, a digital exhibition Multiple Middles by UD curatorial graduate students and an exhibition launched in February 2022 by UD's Special Collections.

Professor Rujivacharakul received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley where she was trained in architectural history, intellectual history and cultural anthropology. Her scholarship has been supported by awards and fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, USA), the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, USA), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC, USA), Japan Foundation for the Promotion of Sciences (JSPS) (Tokyo, Japan), the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Chicago, USA); the Chang Ching-kuo Foundation (USA & Taiwan), the Needham Research Institute (Cambridge, UK), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (USA), Paul Mellon Centre (London, UK) and the Terra Foundation for American Art (Chicago, USA).

Professor Rujivacharakul is completing publications on a global architectural history between the two world wars and on the connections between artifacts and architectural history. With colleagues in China and the United States, she is also completing an anthology on vernacular architecture and Orientalism.

​At the University of Delaware, she supervises doctoral students in both art history and art conservation departments, working on the connection of material culture, materiality and material sciences. Her doctoral advisees also work on East Asian material culture, export objects and trade history, as well as the disconnect between vernacular architecture and the UNESCO sites in China. At Tsinghua University, she works with colleagues in the history of architecture with an emphasis on preservations of village architecture and vernacular architecture in China. 

Institutional Collaborative Projects

• ​Between Monumental and Vernacular Architecture: Co-directing with Dr. Luo Deyin, an international collab​orative project on architecture and preservation in China, 2015 to present. Funded in part by Ministry of Education, Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, and Tsinghua University, China.

• The Global Impact of Asian Aesthetics on American Art and Material Culture. Co-directing with Professor J. Ritchie Garrison, an inter-institutional collaborative project on aesthetics and art. Funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art.​