My writing engages with the art, architecture, and visual culture of South Asia and its diasporas from the late eighteenth century to the present. I built my early thinking from a study of the urban space, architecture, and visual culture of late eighteenth century, seeking to unpack the complexities and tensions of the early colonial era in the subcontinent. This work served as a foundation for a later project in which I traced the genealogy of the spinning wheel and the practice of spinning from c. 1800 through to its use as political rhetoric in the anti-colonial movement of the early twentieth century. My Art for a Modern India (2009) sought to counter a regional splintering of the nascent canonical narrative of twentieth-century art and thereby take seriously the “national” in relation to the modern, as both terms refracted in the aftermath of partition and war. And, as India sought to establish itself on an international stage through art and exhibition, I unfolded the small moments of duration that formed the 1985–86 Festival of India in the US, from artists making pottery in the galleries of the Smithsonian to the demand for the continual introduction of India’s contemporary art to international audiences. Spurred by a question about who or what “Paul Klee” might be in the South Asia of the 1960s, my recent research focuses on the painting and editorial work of K.C.S. Paniker (1911–77), who called Klee his “guru” and yet pursued his own experimentations with “written pictures.” I find that Paniker’s work, shot through with the garden, the refugee, and the linguistic diversity of southern India, deeply questions the foundations of knowing for a decolonizing world in the 1960s and 1970s. I continue to think about the “Paul Klee spirit” that haunts global modernism of the later twentieth century.

I am also engaged in a long-term dialogue with photography, photo-books, and photographic installations. Photographic archives grounded my work on the genealogy of spinning and I have continued to probe the complexities of the medium by thinking with the work of Dayanita Singh and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, and collaborating on the edited volume Documenting Industry with Ranu Roychoudhuri. I have long been interested in installation and sculpture, both in the US and in India—the sculpture–installations of Rina Banerjee and the transmedial work of both Nandagopal (painting, metal, enamel) and Raghav Kaneria (drawing, photography, and metal) are touchstones for me in this regard. Throughout my work I am attentive to the interplay between space and the activities it shapes and enables, as well as the temporality of movement, performance, and duration as embodied by textiles, photographs, film, sculptural forms, paintings, and people. At the core of each of these engagements lies an attentive commitment to visual culture in its materiality, its instability, its active role for history, and its reconstitution in different epistemes under changing political demands.

I am honored to serve as chair of the Advanced Academic Programs in Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage Management at Johns Hopkins. I have served as a consultant and a curator of modern and contemporary Indian art for the Peabody Essex Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. My academic career has enabled me to teach across North America and in the UK, at institutions including St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Swansea University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins. I have had the privilege of speaking to a wide range of audiences, at venues from the Art Seminar Group of Baltimore and the Flint Institute of Art to the University of Brighton and the National Museum of Korea. 

I received my BA in the History of Art from Pomona College and my PhD in South Asian and Islamic Art History from the University of Minnesota, working with both Frederick M. Asher and Catherine B. Asher. Throughout my career in academia, I have actively developed courses in Asian and Islamic art, created innovative approaches to the art history survey, and led seminars in Asian studies, gender studies, photography, museum studies, postcolonial theory, film studies, and art historical theory and methodology.

Graduate Seminars

• History of Art: Theories and Methods
• Transnational Asian Art: Modernism in Motion
• Script, Character, Scribble: Writing and Pseudo-Writing in Modern and Contemporary Art
• Art and Colonialism: Nineteenth Century India
• Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Modernism: Critical Engagements
• The Active Body
• Politics and Visual Culture
• The Epistemology of Photography
• Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art
• Readings in Material Culture (with Elizabeth Rodini)
• Postcolonial Theory
• Provincialising Europe

Advanced Undergraduate

• Reply All: Letter-writing in Art and History (with Leslie Cozzi, BMA)
• Modern Art in a Global Frame
• Photography, the Archive, and Memory
• Modern and Contemporary Art: Middle East and South Asia
• Art and Colonialism: Nineteenth Century India
• Asia America: Art and Architecture
• Modern and Contemporary Art in South Asia
• The Epistemology of Photography
• Global Modern Art: Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas
• Encountering South and Southeast Asian Art (with Robert Mintz, Walters Art Museum)
• The Politics of Display in South Asia
• Key Moments in East Asian Politics and Visual Culture since 1850
• Murals, Monuments, and Museums
• The Harem and the Veil: Space and Gender in the Islamic World
• Gender in Asian and Islamic Art
• Stories with Pictures: Narrative in Asian and Islamic Art
• Critical Approaches to the Analysis of Art
• Contemporary Asian Art and Architecture
• Asian Art after 1945
• Colonialism and Nationalism in India
• Politics of the Middle East and South Asia
• Cinema, History, and Politics

Introductory

• Introduction to Art History (disciplinary and global survey)
• Introduction to Asian Studies
• Introduction to Asian Art
• Monuments of Asia
• East Asian Art, Culture, and Politics
• South Asian Art, Culture, and Politics
• Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Indian Art in the Museum
• Arts of Japan
• Arts of China
• Art of the Islamic World
• Buddhist Art of Asia
• Understanding Global Politics
• Rock Paper Sword: Ancient and Medieval World Art
• Art in Wales, 18th–21st c. (e-learning)

Books, Catalogs, and Edited Volumes

Modernism in Relation: KCS Paniker’s Written Pictures. Getty Publications; in press.

Documenting Industry: Photography, Labor, Aesthetics, and the Machine in India. Co-edited with Ranu Roychoudhuri. Visual and Media Histories Series. Routledge, 2025.

Institutions, Infrastructure, Interconnections: Essays in Honor of Frederick M. Asher.  Co-edited with Sumathi Ramaswamy. South Asian Studies 40.1 (April 2024).

Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017 (awarded the Meiss Publication Grant, CAA)

Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500–present. Co-edited with Deborah Hutton. New York: Routledge Publications, 2016.

A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture. Co-edited with Deborah Hutton. London & New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publications, 2011 (paperback edition 2015).

Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection. Exhibition catalog, 2011.

Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India. London: Routledge, 2010 (paperback edition 2012).

Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

Asian Art: An Anthology. Co-edited with Deborah Hutton. London & New York: Blackwell Publications, 2006.

Select Articles and Book Chapters

“Dayanita Singh’s Machines.” In Rebecca M. Brown and Ranu Roychoudhuri, eds., Documenting Industry: Photography, Labor, Aesthetics, and the Machine in India. Routledge, 2025, 135–57.

“Artistic Relations: Mapping KCS Paniker’s Constellations.” In Rebecca M. Brown and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds., Being in the World Artfully: Institutions, Infrastructure, Interconnections, special issue of South Asian Studies, 40.1 (2024): 46–62. DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2024.2332011

“Rina Banerjee’s Decolonial Ecologies.” In Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black, eds. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History. Routledge, 2023, 459–69. DOI: 10.4324/9781003152262-41

“Spirituality and Modern Art in India and the Himalayas: Neo-Tantra, Tibet, and the Goddess.” In Bokyung Kim and Kyunghee Pyun, eds. Teaching South and Southeast Asian Art: Multiethnicity, Cross-Racial Interaction, and Nationalism. Palgrave MacMillan, 2023, 81–100.

“Intimate Archive: Dayanita Singh’s Feminist Practice.” History of Photography 46.2–3 (2022): 184–205, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2023.2213953.

“Mimicry and Misrecognition: Re-dressing the Colonial Relation in Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s Photographic Transformations.” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 7.1–2 (2021): 79–104.

“KCS Paniker’s Painterly Deflections.” In Niharika Dinkar and Megha Sharma Sehdev, eds., Tirchhi Nazar: The Gaze in South Asia Beyond Darshan, special issue of South Asian Studies, 37:2 (2021): 103–16, DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2021.1922208.

“The Gold, the Gold; the Glory, the Glory: Overcome by Colour in the 1870s and the 1980s.” Online forum on Decolonising Colour, Third Text Online, http://www.thirdtext.org/brown-thegold, published February 20, 2020.

“To Pick Up a Brush: A Double-take, Gieve Patel, and Indian Art of the 1980s.” Third Text 31.2–3 (2017): 261–88.

“Painting Colonial and Modern at the Rashtrapati Bhavan.” Catalog essay (6000 words) and 47 catalog entries (16000 words). In Partha Mitter and Naman Ahuja, eds. The Arts and Interiors of Rashtrapati Bhavan: Lutyens and Beyond. New Delhi: Government Publications Division, 2016, 160–235.

“A Distant Contemporary: Indian Twentieth-Century Art in the Festival of India.” Art Bulletin 96.3 (September 2014).

“Colonial Polyrhythm: Imaging Action in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Visual Anthropology 26.4 (2014): 269–97.

“Revivalism, Modernism, and Internationalism: Finding the Old in the New India.” In A New India? edited by Anthony D’Costa, 151–78. London: Anthem Press, 2010.

“P.T. Reddy, Neo-Tantrism, and Modern Indian Art.” Art Journal 64.4 (Winter 2005): 26–49.

“The Cemeteries and the Suburbs: Patna’s Challenges to the Colonial City in South Asia.” The Journal of Urban History 29.2 (January 2003): 151–73.