Kateryna Malaia, PhD, is an architectural historian and author of Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture before and after 1991 (NIUP/Cornell University Press, 2023) and Mass Housing in Ukraine: Building Typologies and Catalogue of Series, 1922–2022, co-authored with Philipp Meuser (DOM Publishers, 2024). The latter was shortlisted for the Deutsches Architekturmuseum Book Award and received the Typology Book Award from The Architect’s Company. In 2026, she co-edited Protests Beyond the Plaza: Everyday Space, Urban Morphologies, and Strategies with Nathan Hutson (Routledge).
Her articles have appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architectural Histories, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, and other publications.
Malaia received her professional architectural education at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (NAFAA) in Kyiv and earned a PhD in Architecture from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She has previously taught at Mississippi State University, Portland State University, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and the University of Utah.
Malaia’s research explores housing and everyday spaces in times of transformation, including the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the contemporary crisis of housing insecurity in the United States. Methodologically, her research combines traditional sources, including archives and architectural documentation, with oral histories, popular media, and historical legal databases.
Her current project, Housing Rural Ukraine, examines the development of rural housing in Ukraine during the late Soviet period, as well as how rural housing has changed since 1991 under economic, social, and political pressures, and following the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Malaia joined the Kharkiv School of Architecture (KSA) faculty in 2025.