M 204, Th 2:30-3:30, F 12-1
My scholarly research focuses on the preservation and representation of South Asian architectural monuments, and the implications of these activities on the construction of social identities, national memory, and political protest. More broadly, my research focuses on issues of artistic agency, the intersection of modernist aesthetics in the colonial and postcolonial world, and the visual culture of contemporary Asia. My experience in research, teaching, and museum work strengthens my commitment to innovative instruction and scholarly investigation in the fields of South Asian visual culture, colonial and postcolonial cultural theory, Contemporary Asian Art, Asian American Art, and Islamic art and architecture.
My current research deals with the modern spatial history of Fatehpur Sikri, an Indian national monument. I argue that this Mughal palace-complex, built by Akbar the Great in the late sixteenth century, has repeatedly been produced as a social space in which Indian nationhood was enacted, or its very possibility contested at different junctures in modern Indian history. Fatehpur Sikri provides a unique case study of built environments as social spaces impacting the construction and contestation of modern Indian national identity. Moreover, my examination argues for a more critical and interdisciplinary approach to the study of India’s architectural monuments as local, national, and global spaces of social ordering and identity formation. In so doing, I draw on the subjects of aesthetics, imperialism, historiography, geography, archaeology, tourism, postcolonialism, and transnationalism. Choosing to broaden my scope of inquiry in this manner has not only provided a deeper and more textured body of evidence for my project, but has also enhanced my ability to teach art within a dynamic and multidimensional framework.
In my current position as Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University I am teaching and developing courses on the arts of Asia (India, China, and Japan), the Islamic world, as well as on Asian American Art. My classes are presented as thematic studies that focus on the relationship of art to the social, political, and religious contexts that lend it meaning. In addition to my teaching experience, I bring with me a profound interest in introducing undergraduates at SFSU to new ways of seeing and understanding visual culture, and in advising future graduate students in their own quests for investigative strategies vis-à-vis art and art historical study.
Education
Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles
