Professor Anoma Pieris

Biography

Anoma Pieris is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning. She holds a BSc from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, an MArch and SMArchS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a PhD from UC Berkeley and an MPhil in geography from the University of Melbourne. Anoma’s training is in architectural history and in geography with a specialist focus in postcolonial and subaltern studies methods as applied to the architecture of South and Southeast Asia; more specifically to Sri Lanka and Singapore. She has published widely on issues of nationalism, citizenship and sovereignty as viewed through the lens of architecture with a specialist interest in penal architecture from the colonial period to the Pacific War. Her publications related to these topics include Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The trouser under the cloth (Routledge 2012), Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: a penal history of Singapore's plural society (University of Hawaii Press 2009), Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka (2018) and Architecture on the Borderline: boundary politics and built space (Routledge - Architext series 2019). Anoma was a recipient of an ARC Future Fellowship for the project Temporal Cities, Provisional Citizens: Architectures of Internment (2015-2018) which examines prisoner of war and internment architecture across the Pacific Basin during World War II. She is lead CI on an ARC Discovery Project, Architecture and Industry: The migrant contribution to nation-building (2019-22).

Anoma has published previously on the design profession in Asia and Australia with particular attention to the design of museums and cultural centres for or by Indigenous communities globally. She was co-author with Janet McGaw of Assembling the Centre: Architecture for Indigenous Cultures. Australia and Beyond (Routledge 2015) and lead author of the co-authored publication Indigenous Place: Contemporary buildings, landmarks and places of significance in southeast Australia and beyond, with F. Johnson, N. Tootell, J. McGaw and R. Berg (Melbourne School of Design 2014). Her most recent publication in this area, Indigenous Museums and Cultural Centers: An illustrated international survey (Rowman and Littlefield 2016), surveys 48 examples of Indigenous cultural facilities in Australia and overseas.

Anoma was co-editor of Fabrications the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (2016 - 2019) and was on the Melbourne editorial team of Post Colonial Studies (2010-2018). She is co-founder with Duanfang Lu of the Society of Architectural and Urban Historians of Asia https://www.sauhasia.org/, a transnational network aimed at fostering high quality research on Asian built environments. She is the Southeast Asia Councillor for the Asian Studies Association of Australia (2019-2020).

Anoma teaches architectural history and design in the faculty across both the postgraduate and undergraduate programmes.

Featured projects

• Indigenous Placemaking in Central Melbourne: Representations, Practices and Creative Research
• Temporal Cities, Provisional Citizens: Architectures of Internment
• Rethinking Modern Asia-Pacific Architectures: New Aesthetic Pedagogies International workshop
• Architecture and Industry: The migrant contribution to nation-building