Faculty of Art
Desiree Valadares is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at UBC. She is a landscape architect (Guelph/Edinburgh), urban designer (McGill) and architectural historian (UC Berkeley). She was born in Mumbai, India, grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, Canada and practiced architecture and historic preservation in the UK and the US.
Her research and teaching focus on territoriality, occupation, empire in Canada and the non-contiguous US with a focus on the aftermath of Asian migration (wartime forced relocation) and Indigenous intersections in the Pacific. Her current book project tentatively titled, Carceral Conversions, studies contemporary heritage politics and shifting patterns of land tenure at Pacific war heritage landscapes such as prisoner-of-war camps (Hawai’i), road labour camps (interior British Columbia), and repurposed canneries and gold mines (Alaska) that confined a range of populations including non-citizen POWs, civilians of Japanese descent and Unangax̂ or Alaska Native peoples.
