Faculty – Community Education Division
Dr. Ujjwala Khot-Palsuley is a conservation architect, architectural historian, researcher, and author whose work focuses on Indian temple architecture and its civilisational spread across Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia. She holds a PhD in Architecture and an M.Arch in Architectural Conservation from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, and is also trained in Indology. She is the Founder of Samrchanā – Heritage Research Studio, and Honorary Director of the Indian Heritage Awareness and Research (IHAR), Maharashtra Chapter. Dr. Khot’s doctoral research and subsequent scholarship examine the philosophical, spatial, and ritual continuities between Indian and Khmer temple traditions. Her internationally recognised book Cambodia: India Outside India – Decoding Khmer Architecture is catalogued in the US Library of Congress.
A recipient of multiple national awards, she has curated international conferences, exhibitions, and site seminars in India and Cambodia. She regularly delivers keynote lectures and conducts immersive courses on temple cities, cultural landscapes, and Indic knowledge systems. Her mission is to generate wider public awareness of temples in India and to cultivate an Indic perspective for understanding temples as living systems of knowledge, culture, and spiritual thought. Her work seeks to re-centre temples as living knowledge systems- integrating architecture, cosmology, ritual, and cultural memory- beyond colonial and purely stylistic interpretations.
