Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi’s Islamic Architecture
with Aditi Chandra
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
Starts at 12:00 PM
Location: COB2-295
RSVP here
For any questions please contact humanities@ucmerced.edu
Light refreshments will be provided!
About the speaker:
Aditi Chandra received her Ph.D. in Islamic Art and Architectural History (with a focus on South Asia) from the University of Minnesota in 2011. Her training is broad, including a Masters in History from Delhi University and a Masters in Art History with a minor in modern South Asian literature from the University of Minnesota. Her teaching and research attempt to push disciplinary boundaries of art history by engaging with a wide range of popular visualities and spatial experiences. Her current book project titled “Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi’s Islamic Architecture” examines how colonial archeological and travel-related processes such as landscaping, site museums, the dissemination of postcards, and the eviction of refugees transformed Delhi’s Sultanate and Mughal architecture into modern monuments for touristic consumption in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art in 2013 and a recipient of the UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship (2019-20). She has curated exhibitions titled "Imperial Post: Views of Colonial Delhi" and “Waterscapes and Wet Bodies through the Colonial Eye: West Africa, Hawai‘i, and India,” which showcased late 19th and early 20th-century prints, newspapers, photographs, and travel ephemera. Her publications include essays in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Journal of South Asian Popular Culture, Shangri-La Working Papers in Islamic Art, and Art History Pedagogy and Practice. She has also coedited a volume of essays called The Nation and Its Margins: Rethinking Community (2019).
