Deborah Stein

Deborah Stein

Lecturer Faculty
Art History
Email: deborahstein@sfsu.edu

Biography

Professor Stein is the author of a recent book The Hegemony of Heritage: Ritual and the Record in Stone (open access and print paperback from UC Press 2018; and, hardcover art book from Mapin 2019). This work takes the reader on a journey back in time to four different periods to explore what the visual and inscriptional record can tell us about a distinct set of Hindu and Jain temples in the Southern Rajasthan over the past one thousand years. Trained as a medievalist art historian of South Asian Art, Dr. Stein holds a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and has taught widely at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, Mills College, and San Francisco State University. She has lectured locally and internationally in Hindi, French, and English and currently maintains an active art practice in the Bay Area as a ceramics artist. 

Professor Stein has published several peer-reviewed articles on topics such as multi-sectarian patronage and early modern industrial sites, corporeality and early tantric religion in India, mineral resources worship and stone in tribal premodern India, and living world heritage and ritual practice at Eklingji and Jagat. Current projects focus on Aesthetic Polity in 15th-century in Northwestern India in comparison with city-state of Venice and the urban capitals of the Timurid and Ottoman empires (c. 1440-1505). Dr. Stein teaches Arts of Asia, South Asian Art, and Special Topics in Early Modern and Medieval Global Arts at SF State.