Hello, fellow wanderer, and welcome to my little corner of the internet. I’m Chandni Jeswani, and I listen to places until they begin to speak.

My work investigates the genius loci, the spirit of place that refuses to stay still or stay singular. I study how meaning endures even when geography is lost, remade, or violently undone. The framework I began with - Christian Norberg-Schulz’s idea of place - now bends, fractures, and expands through my work, especially when tested against Indian ritual space, diasporic memory, and sites scarred by erasure. The spirit of place survives in fragments: in liturgy, in longing, in digital traces, in the quiet architecture of faith.

I’m drawn to contradictions: sacred and secular, rooted and unmoored, rigorous and intuitive. I am, by nature, a person of paradoxes: both insider and outsider, historian and storyteller, rigorous yet intuitive. I study the sacred and the ordinary, the enduring and the ephemeral, and thus I believe the paradox is a rich place to think from. I’ve come to believe that a city can be scripture, that memory has architecture, and that research, at its best, is a quiet form of devotion.

I decided to become an architectural historian at fourteen, and the conviction has only deepened. I trained in History of Art with Curating (Distinction) at Birkbeck, University of London. Since then, I’ve resisted the temptation to stay in one lane. My research spans sacred geographies, urban heritagization, comparative place theory, Renaissance patronage, and the spatial afterlives of diaspora. I don’t treat boundaries as walls. I treat them, as the fashionable nomenclature goes now, as prompts.

My work has been presented at conferences in Europe, the UK, the US, and the Middle East, and published in edited volumes and journals exploring architecture, identity, and cultural memory. Outside academia, I take on research-led, quietly radical projects that bring scholarship into public conversation. I prefer work that breathes: intermittent, interdisciplinary, intellectually alive. I’m interested in the spaces where continuity meets transformation, where sacred geographies negotiate modernity, and where cities learn to remember differently.

If something here stirs your own questions, send word, or carrier pigeon. Or better still, let’s conspire.