Kathleen James-Chakraborty has been Professor of Art History at UCD since 2007. From 2007 to 2010 she served as Head of the UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy. A graduate of Yale, James-Chakraborty earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at the University of Minnesota, at the University of California Berkeley, where she was Professor of Architecture, and at the Ruhr University Bochum, where she was a Mercator guest professor. She spent the autumn semesters of 2015 and 2016 at the Yale School of Architecture as the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History.

Elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2011, she is currently on the board of the Chester Beatty Library and of the National Museum of Ireland. She was from 2012 to 2015 the Chair of the Board of the Irish Architecture Foundation and from 2008-2012 the Irish representative to the International Congress of Art Historians.

In addition, she has been a Gambrinus Fellow at the Technical University in Dortmund and twice chaired the Alice Davis Hitchcock Prize committee for the Society of Architectural Historians (US). She also organised the fourth international conference of the European Architectural History Network, held in Dublin Castle on 2-4 June 2016.