Kateryna Malaia, PhD, architectural historian, and author of Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture before and after 1991 (NIUP/ Cornell UP, 2023) and Mass Housing in Ukraine: Building Typologies and Catalogue of Series, 1922–2022, co-authored with Philipp Meuser (DOM Publishers, 2024; shortlisted for the Deutsches Architekturmuseum Book Award, winner of The Architect’s Company “Typology” Book Award). Her forthcoming co-edited volume with Nathan Hutson, Protests Beyond the Plaza: Everyday Space, Urban Morphologies, and Strategies (Routledge, 2026), explores protest and urban form beyond traditional public spaces. Malaia’s articles have appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architectural Histories, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, and other journals.
Malaia received her professional architectural education from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (Kyiv) and holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Utah. Previously, she taught at Mississippi State University, Portland State University, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Her research examines housing and everyday spaces during times of social change—such as the dissolution of the USSR and the contemporary housing insecurity crisis in the United States. Methodologically, her work draws on traditional sources—archives and architectural documentation—as well as oral histories, popular media, and historical legal frameworks.
Her current project, Housing Rural Ukraine, investigates the development of rural housing in late Soviet Ukraine and how it has transformed since 1991 under economic, social, and political pressures, including the ongoing full-scale invasion.
In 2025, she joined the KHSA faculty team.