Rixt Woudstra is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Amsterdam and Co-Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Urban History. She is a historian of modern architecture, with a specific focus on the global circulation of architectural ideas, technologies, and building materials. Her research concentrates on the relationship between the built environment and European colonial expansion, particularly in different parts of Africa in the late nineteenth- and twentieth century. 

Prior to coming to the UvA, she taught at New College of Humanities in London (now Northeastern University) and worked as a Leverhulme-funded postdoctoral research associate at Liverpool University. She completed her Ph.D. in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2020. 

She is currently working on her first book, titled Designing Stability: Modern Housing and Anti-Colonial Protest in ‘British’ Africa, 1945-1957, which explores the construction and design of large-scale British housing projects built across the African colonies during the last, violent decades of colonial rule. Another book written together with Iain Jackson, Ewan Harrison and Michele Tenzon, titled The United Africa Company: Mercantile Architecture and the West African City, will be published with Bloomsbury Press in 2024.  A recent article, co-authored with Hannah le Roux (University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg), titled ' 'Build Your Own House': Betty Spence's Design Research in 1950s South Africa' was published in Architectural Theory Review. 

Her research has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, MIT's Aga Khan Program and the MIT Africa-Program. In May and June of 2023, she co-convened the 'Architecture Summer Series', a series of five lectures showcasing novel approaches in British architectural history at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London.