Rixt Woudstra is Assistant Professor in Architectural History at the University of Amsterdam

She is a historian of modern architecture, material culture and colonialism, with a specific focus on the global circulation of architectural ideas, knowledge, and building materials. At the University of Amsterdam, she teaches various BA and MA courses on architectural and urban history and is affiliated with the Amsterdam Center for Urban History. Previously, she taught in the art history department of New College of Humanities in London (part of Northeastern University in Boston). As a postdoctoral research associate at Liverpool University, she worked on a Leverhulme-funded project exploring mercantile architecture in West Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth century. 

She completed her Ph.D. in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently working on her first book based on her dissertation, titled Designing Stability: Modern Architecture and Anti-Colonial Protest in ‘British’ Africa, 1945-1957, as well as another collaborative book project on the architecture of the United Africa Company in West Africa, with Iain Jackson, Ewan Harrison and Michele Tenzon. Her research has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, MIT's Aga Khan Program and the MIT Africa-Program.