Michal Huss is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research sits at the intersection of architectural and political theory, focusing on the built environment of postcolonial and divided cities, and the ways it shapes daily life, rituals, and practices of repair and resistance.
She completed her ESRC-funded PhD in Architecture at the University of Cambridge in 2021. Her thesis challenged state-centric, crisis-driven framings of migration and borders by foregrounding refugees’ spatial agency in reimagining urban heritage, using participatory “walk-along” ethnography and artistic practice to reconceptualize heritage as a dynamic, contested, and transcultural process.
Her Leverhulme project investigates how everyday spaces of living and dying are contested, focusing on housing, ruins, cemeteries, and urban ghost stories to show how cities remain haunted by colonialism, division, and capitalist accumulation. Challenging conventional approaches to urban knowledge, her work combines participatory ethnography, archival research, and artistic methods to trace the circulation of spatial laws and practices between South Asia and the Middle East.
Her forthcoming book, Remaking Urban Heritage will be published by Amsterdam University Press in October 2025. She is also developing a second monograph, provisionally titled Bulldozer Injustice in the Necropolis: Death and Life in Post/Colonial Cities.