Curt Gambetta is an architectural historian and designer with research interests in the history and politics of building materials, modern South Asia, fieldwork in the built environment, and the spatial politics of waste. His current book project, Substitutions of Modernity: House-Making in Postcolonial India, examines the widespread substitution of imported and inaccessible materials in the production of housing in postcolonial India. Combining ethnography, archival research, and oral history, the project shows how state and industry-led efforts to democratize access to housing tied everyday material practices to India's economic and political self-reliance. Focusing on the making of earthen substitutes for concrete and image-based substitutes for marble, it shows that their production has been used to transform aspirations to modern housing associated with state led development and Western models of growth. In turn, the book argues that scientists, architects, engineers, individual house builders, and others make use of substitution to navigate the social and environmental consequences of macro level transformations in India's political economy, thus crafting alternative pathways to modernity in their wake.

His second book project, Fieldwork After Modernism, examines the use of firsthand observation in research about the built environment by architects, architectural historians, artists, photographers, and others during the 1970s and 1980s. The study concentrates on research methods, fieldwork technologies, and documentary practices in different sites of development and abandonment, including postindustrial landscapes in Buffalo, New York, self-built housing in Brazil and Zambia, and heritage sites in South India. It analyzes reports, fieldnotes, drawings, photographs, and narratives of fieldwork to demonstrate how fieldwork practitioners differentiated their practice from histories of knowledge making in modernism and their deep entanglement with colonial power. But in closely examining the methods, technologies, and labor of fieldwork, the project shows how practices of firsthand observation encountered new structures of power and knowledge, such as the complicity of fieldwork with neoliberal financial institutions.

Prior to Dartmouth, he was a Visiting Critic at the Cornell University School of Architecture, Art, and Planning (2021-2023), the Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning (2011–2012), and a teaching fellow at Woodbury University in Los Angeles (2012–2013). During the 2000's, he was a resident of the Sarai Program at CSDS in New Delhi and collaborated with scholars at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore on a symposium and edited journal issue about the politics, history, and cultural life of streets in Indian cities. He is currently Faculty Coordinator for the Conversations on South Asia series convened by the South Asian Studies Collective at Dartmouth.