Professor Sankalia's research interests cover areas of architecture and urbanism from the local context of the San Francisco Bay Area to the global perspective of India. Current projects include a co-edited volume of essays, Urban Reinventions: San Francisco's Treasure Island, forthcoming from the University of Hawaii Press, which examines future plans for Treasure Island in the context of global, large-scale land development, and against the backdrop of the island's seventy-year urban history; a book manuscript called The Urban Unseen, which explores the historical, theoretical and design themes related to interstitial spaces in San Francisco's historic urban fabric; and, Mumbai-Caracas: Urban Spaces and Subjects in the Global South, which is an attempt to bridge cultures across Latin America and South Asia around shared experiences of urban space and modernity. Other research projects are related to the planning and urban design of public spaces in India. Professor Sankalia is co-founder of the University of San Francisco faculty reading group El Circulo, which meets every week to read and discuss critical theory.