People

Research Overview

I am a scholar of modern and contemporary art with a specialization in South Asia. My current book manuscript, Nasreen Mohamedi and the Postcolonial History of Abstraction, considers the abstract art of the South Asian artist Nasreen Mohamedi and its relationship to the postcolonial critique of the figure in painting. My second research project, Sea Time: The Long Art of Climate at Kochi-Muziris, considers the longue-durée address of five contemporary projects deliberating urgency along the Southern Indian coast between 2012 and the present. Essays on the artists Vivan Sundaram, Zarina, Dayanita Singh, and Tyeb Mehta are published or forthcoming with Modernism/modernity, Yale University Press, Steidl, and the Tyeb Mehta Foundation. Criticism has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Art Journal, ASAP-J and in curatorial projects for Gallery Espace, Green Art Gallery, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, and the Triveni Kala Sangam.

My research has been supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, an Asher family fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, and grants from the Paul Mellon Centre, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Getty Research Institute. Before coming to Rochester, I was a Junior Fellow with the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and a Curatorial Fellow with the Offices of the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director and the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

I regularly offer two surveys, South Asian Art and Modern Art, and the Department’s Senior Seminar in Art Historical Methods. In the Fall, I usually offer a 200/400-level seminar in South Asian Art (possible topics include “The Body in South Asian Art, c. 1993,” “Modern Indian Painting,” and “Kochi-Muziris”); in the Spring I usually offer a 300/500-level seminar, either reading-intensive or writing-intensive, in anticolonial thought (possible topics include “Capitalism and Colonialism” “Postcolonial, Decolonial” and “Subaltern Studies”). I also teach advanced topics in modernism (“Abstract Art” “Modern Art and Mass Culture” “Modern Painting”), and with Mizin Shin, am developing a “studio seminar” on printmaking, to be offered 2027-2028.

Research Interests

• Art and Criticism after 1950
• Modern Art and Modernism
• South Asian Art, Architecture, and Aesthetics
• Postcolonial Theory and Subaltern Studies