Robin Schuldenfrei

Robin Schuldenfrei is the Katja and Nicolai Tangen Senior Lecturer in 20th-Century Modernism at The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She holds a PhD from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and previously held tenure-track roles at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on modern architecture’s intersections with materiality, political agency, migration, and cultural critique. She leads The Courtauld’s Migrations Research Cluster, exploring how global human movement shapes cultural and architectural values through object studies. She is also a key member of the European Architectural History Network’s Architecture and Migration group, and co-founded the Architecture Cultures Research Cluster at The Courtauld.

Her interdisciplinary efforts include co-chairing the UK-based collective Unsettled Subjects, which decolonizes architectural teaching and practice through critical engagement with identity, race, and gender. Schuldenfrei actively supports Ukrainian architectural professionals amid geopolitical crises. Awards include grants from the Graham Foundation, Gerda Henkel Foundation, and DAAD. She supervises PhD students researching topics ranging from Bauhaus legacy to gendered spatial analysis in Victorian London.

Her major publications include *Objects in Exile: Modern Art and Design across Borders* (2024) and *Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900-1933* (2018). She edits books like *Iteration: Episodes in the Mediation of Art and Architecture* (2020), exploring how iterative processes shape artistic thought. Her speaker series *Modernities: Architecture, Design, Theory* at The Courtauld’s Research Forum highlights transnational modernist discourse. Recent work examines how material objects mediate cultural displacement and modernist evolution through exile narratives.