Dr. Kush Patel (they/them) heads the Master of Arts Program at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology (SMI) in Bengaluru, India, where they also serve as Associate Professor and Course Leader for the MA Contemporary Art Practice. In addition, Dr. Patel directs The Just Futures Co-lab at SMI, which builds discourse and scholarship in the digital humanities through critical pedagogy; archives and databases; interactive digital storytelling; and inquiries into queer- and trans-feminist digital media technologies and knowledge infrastructures. They are an editorial collective member of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP) and a social justice pedagogies topic editor for Reviews in DH. They also serve on the advisory board of QAMRA (Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection, and Activism) and are a founding member of the Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed Collective. To get in touch, visit their academic profile or connect with them via email at kush.patel@manipal.edu and on social media @kshpatel or access their ORCID iD and Humanities Commons profile.

Dr. Patel’s writings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Digital Studies / Le champ numérique; gta Verlag (Institute for History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich); Journal of Architectural Education (JAE); and Public: A Journal of Imagining America, as well as in edited collections such as Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2026); Digital Humanities Workshops: Lessons Learned (Routledge UK, 2023); Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Science through Critical Race Theory (The MIT Press, 2021); and Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India (Avani Institute of Design, 2021) among others. Dr. Patel has also contributed to Open Access Resources for teaching social justice pedagogies in digital arts and humanities on #DariahTeach (2024); co-edited and co-authored a set of special issues on caregiving as method for PLATFORM (2023); and co-developed an episode on care praxis and digital pedagogy for the Teacher of the Ear podcast series (2021).

Their forthcoming peer-reviewed publications include a chapter in EnTwine: A Critical and Creative Companion to Teaching with Twine (Amherst College Press, 2026) and a co-edited volume (with Dr Ashley Caranto Morford and Dr Arun Jacob) on anti-colonial digital humanities from punctum books (under contract). As 2026 Gilbert Fellow in Humanities and 2025 Hunt-Simes Visiting Chair of Sexuality Studies with the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Research Center (SSSHARC), as well as a teaching member of the 2025 Hunt-Simes Institute in Sexuality Studies (HISS) also with SSSHARC at the University of Sydney, Dr. Patel has fostered research- and workshop-based collaborations with academics, artists, archivists, and community members towards co-developing (with Dr. Susan Potter) The Just Archives Collaboratory Project. Together, these publications and collaborations model the intersections of Dr. Patel’s scholarly practice with the fields of Architectural History and Theory; Contemporary Art; Digital Humanities; Public Humanities; Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies; Critical Librarianship; and Critical Pedagogy. 

Prior to joining Srishti Manipal, Dr. Patel held faculty positions as Academic Excellence Chair and Associate Professor of Architecture and Humanities at Avani Institute of Design in Calicut; and “alt-ac” positions as Associate Faculty Librarian of Digital Pedagogy at Hatcher Graduate Library, as LSA Adjunct Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Humanities, and as Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Director of Academic Programming at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities and Humanities Collaboratory in Ann Arbor.

Dr. Patel completed their Ph.D. in Architecture from the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, where they researched issues of participatory politics, narrative building, and social production of space in the French radical architectural works of the “post-68” period. They have served as graduate student Public Humanities Fellow with Rackham’s Program in Public Scholarship, as Engaged Pedagogy Initiative Fellow with LSA’s Office of Community-Engaged Academic Learning, as Mellon Public Humanities Summer Fellow at the U-M Detroit Center, and as Project Assistant in the Art and Architecture Special Collections. Dr. Patel is a registered architect in India and they hold professional degrees with gold medal distinction in Architecture and Urban Design from South Gujarat University, Surat and CEPT University, Ahmedabad respectively, as well as a Master of Science in Architectural Design Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.