Associate Professor
About
To reconstruct moments in the history of South Asia, I like to think across geographical boundaries and other categories including nature and culture, art and time, materials and meaning systems, word and image, human and non-human animal, and local phenomena and global formations.
My first book Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains: Architecture, Religion, and Nature in the Central Himalayas (2019, South Asian edition 2021) traces how the Himalayas emerged as a sacred landscape. My second book, The Amaruśhataka and the Lives of Indian Love Poems (2022) explores the vast transfers of knowledge that transpired in the second millenium CE. My third book, India's Composite Heritage: A Workbook for Children and Parents (2022, reprinted 2023) seeks to nurture visual literacy.
In addition to publishing articles in refereed journals including Archives of Asian Art, Ars Orientalis, Artibus Asiae, Arts Asiatiques, History of Photography, South Asian Studies, and RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, I periodically write on cultural policy for the editorial and opinion pages of The Hindu and other newspapers in India.
Recently, I completed a study on the production and consumption of astrological, literary, and genealogical scrolls from early modern western India. Currently, I am currently researching and writing an article on sculpture and touch in medieval South India.
My current book project is leading me to focus my gaze on a corpus of vessels from the Brahmaputra Valley and adjacent hilltops, a cultural crossroads of India, China, Bangladesh, and Myanmar and query identity formation.
Southeast Asia is a growing area of interest. My exhibition, "Angkor Complex: Cultural Heritage and Post-Genocide Memory in Cambodia" – supported by grants from the National Endownment for the Arts, Michigan Arts and Cultural Council, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and other agencies – opened at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in February 2024.
My courses examine the arts and architectures of South Asia, Himalayan aesthetics, yoga philosophy and practice, the integration of visual media in modern self-fashioning, law, development, and heritage preservation in India, and collecting and displaying South and Southeast Asian art.
I sit on the editorial board of The Art Bulletin, a flagship journal of art history globally, covering prehistoric to 21st-century art.
Inquiries from prospective students are welcome.
Affiliations
- Center for South Asian Studies
- Center for Southeast Asian Studies
- Center for World Performance Studies
- Global Islamic Studies Center
