Rixt Woudstra is an Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Amsterdam and Co-Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Urban History. She is a historian of modern architecture, with a specific focus on the global circulation of architectural ideas, building materials, and technologies in the twentieth century. Her research explores the transformation of the built environment in response to European colonial expansion, particularly in West Africa. Before coming to the University of Amsterdam, she taught in London at New College of Humanities (now Northeastern University) and worked as a Leverhulme-funded Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Liverpool. She completed her Ph.D at the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2020. 

Her first book, Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company (2025), written together with Iain Jackson, Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon, and Claire Tunstall, is an architectural history of  West Africa through the lens of the United Africa Company, one of the largest commercial firms in West Africa in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. The book explores technological, aesthetic, and political shifts through an architectural lens, and shows how the UAC was involved in the construction of offices, factories, harbors, housing, stores, and infrastructure across a vast region. Her current book project, based on my PhD research at MIT, charts the building of large-scale housing projects across 'British' Africa during decolonization. Recent articles, such as 'Accelerating Development: Taylor Woodrow and Arcon’s Prefabricated Steel Structures in Decolonizing West Africa,' written with Iain Jackson and Ewan Harrison, ' 'Build Your Own House': Betty Spence's Design Research in 1950s South Africa', co-authored with Hannah le Roux, and 'Property, Land, and Race in the Colonial Built Environment: An Interview with Itohan Osayimwese' were published in ABE Journal, Architectural Theory Review and Architectural Histories. Together with Michael Faciejew, she edited a special issue of ABE Journal, titled 'Transactional Spaces: Currency in the Imperial Built Environment'. 

A new research project together with David Duindam and Anita Halim Lim, Concrete Colonialism: Architecture and Heritage in Indonesia around Independence also explores building materials, specifically the production and use of concrete in colonial and post-Independence Indonesia. Starting in 2025, this project is supported by a four-year Starting Grant from NWO. 

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. In May and June of 2023, she co-convened the 'Architecture Summer Series', a series of five lectures on new themes within British architectural history at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. More recently, she made a map of Modern Architecture in Amsterdam, published by Blue Crow Media.