Recent Faculty Publications

Publisher: Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya,  Mumbai (2022)

The first comprehensive study of the artist Robert Heinecken and his critical views on the culture of mass media

From the 1960s through the late 1990s, Robert Heinecken’s controversial art continually challenged inherited ideas around consumerism, the facticity of reportage, and visual culture’s relationship to gender and identity politics. Author Matthew Biro presents an exhaustive look at Heinecken’s life and art in the first book-length study dedicated...

A unique seventeenth-century account of painting as it was practiced, taught, and discussed during a period of extraordinary artistic and intellectual ferment in the Netherlands.

The only comprehensive work on painting written by a Dutch artist in the later seventeenth century, Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst, anders de zichtbaere werelt (Introduction to the Academy of Painting; or, The Visible World, 1678) has long served as a source of valuable insights on a range of topics, from firsthand reports of training in Rembrandt...

Visual art has a ubiquitous political cast today. But which politics? Daniel Herwitz seeks clarity on the various things meant by politics, and how we can evaluate their presumptions or aspirations in contemporary art.

Drawing on the work of William Kentridge, drenched in violence, race, and power, and the artworld immolations of Banksy, Herwitz's examples range from the NEA 4 and the question of offense-as-dissent, to the community driven work of George Gittoes, the identity politics of contemporary American art and (for contrast with the power of visual media) literature written in ...

From approximately the third century BCE through the thirteenth century CE, the remote mountainous landscape around the glacial sources of the Ganga (Ganges) River in the Central Himalayas in northern India was transformed into a region encoded with deep meaning, one approached by millions of Hindus as a primary locus of pilgrimage.

Nachiket Chanchani’s innovative study explores scores of stone edifices and steles that were erected in this landscape. Through their forms, locations, interactions with the natural environment, and sociopolitical context, these lithic ensembles evoked legendary...

New arts created in the context of new social realities are impacting our traditional ideas about aesthetics. Art, art markets and aesthetics now interact in ways that demand new forms of thought and revision of old. Cosmopolitan Aesthetics presents the first thorough account of the challenges facing aesthetics today in the light of globalization, introducing the history that underpins them.

This is an ideal starting point for anyone looking to better understand 21st century art and aesthetics. Beginning with globalization and the nature of global art markets today, Daniel...

In the wake of controversies over printing or displaying images of the Prophet Muhammad, Christiane Gruber’s aim is to bring back into scholarly and public discussion the ‘lost’ history of imagining the Prophet in Islamic cultures. By studying the various verbal and visual constructions of the Prophet’s character and persona over the course of more than one thousand years, Gruber seeks to correct public misconceptions and restore to Islam its rich artistic heritage, illuminating the critical role Muhammad has played in Muslim constructions of self and community at different times and...

Visual Typology in early Modern Europe: Continuity and Expansion is the first study that examines the varied manifestations of typological thinking in diverse media of the visual arts from the Late Middle Ages through the seventeenth century in Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, and France. This study counteracts the underlying misconception that typology was in decline or even ceased to exist in the sixteenth century. The studies within this volume offer new interpretations that redefine what is meant by typological thinking in the early modern period.

Brepols Publishers, ...

Japan is arguably the first postindustrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. Over the past decade, Japanese humanoid robots designed for use in homes, hospitals, offices, and schools have become celebrated in mass and social media throughout the world. 

In Robo sapiens japanicus, Jennifer Robertson casts a critical eye on press releases and public-relations videos that misrepresent robots as being as versatile and agile as their science-fiction counterparts. An ethnography and sociocultural history of governmental and academic...