Speakers
“The Idea of Sacral Kingship between Islamic and Turco-Mongol Concepts of Politics”, March 5, 2021, 1pm GMT
Evrim Binbas
Evrim Binbaş received his PhD degree from the University of Chicago. After seven years at Royal Holloway, University of London, he moved to the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. He studies early modern Islamic history with a particular focus on the Timurid and Turkmen dynasties in the fifteenth century.
“Written in Stone: Traces of Medieval Architects”, March 26, 2021, 2pm GMT
Subhashini Kaligotla
Subhashini Kaligotla is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Yale University. Her research focuses on sacred architecture—Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain—with emphasis on the ancient and medieval periods. Her forthcoming book, Shiva’s Waterfront Temples: Architects and their Audiences in Medieval India (Yale University Press, 2022), examines the creative resources of Deccan architects in dialogue with the response of their contemporary audiences. The book is an account of the shared cultural and aesthetic values that shaped built space in the medieval Deccan. A second book project, provisionally titled Seeing Ghosts, is interested in the iconographies of death and the afterlife in early Indian Ocean worlds.
Kaligotla is also a practicing poet and author of the poetry collection, Bird of the Indian Subcontinent (2018).
“Balsam and Betel Nut Palm: Botanical Representation in the Early Modern Deccan”, April 9, 2021, 1pm London (8am New York, 5:30pm Mumbai)
Nicolas Roth
Nicolas Roth received his PhD in South Asian Studies from Harvard University. His research explores the history of gardens and horticulture in early modern India, as well as the material and intellectual culture of the region more broadly. He works with materials in Sanskrit, Persian, and various forms of Hindi and Urdu across a broad array of textual genres, as well as with visual sources found in painting and other art forms.
“Jaina Temple Architecture of Coastal Karnataka: Climatic Dependencies and Artistic Freedoms”, April 30, 2021, 1pm London (8am New York, 5:30pm Mumbai)
Julia A. B. Hegewald
Julia Hegewald is Professor of Oriental Art at the University of Bonn. She focuses on artistic and architectural expressions of different forms of dependency in Asian, particularly South Asian, art and architecture. She employs the theory of ‘re-use’ to show how different people have reacted in a variety of situations of extreme dependency, frequently in very creative ways, to integrate the old and the new, to bridge divides and eventually to contribute to cultural processes which are able to heal and mediate between at times wide and violent disparities of cultural expression.
“Rocks from a brush: Artistic encounters with Deccani rocks, hills and landscapes”, May 14, 2021, 1pm London (8am New York, 5:30pm Mumbai)
Navina Najat Haidar
Navina Haidar is Nasser Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah Curator in Charge of the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was the coordinating curator of the New Islamic Galleries project, which came to fruition with the 2011 opening of an extraordinary sequence of galleries dedicated to the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia. Her major recent exhibitions have included Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy (2015) and Divine Pleasures: The Kronos Collection of Rajput Painting (2016). She is currently working on a major exhibition—Jahangir: Emperor, Connoisseur, Naturalist of the Mughal Age—scheduled for 2024.
“Discovering the Deccan”, May 28, 2021, 1pm London (8am New York, 5:30pm Mumbai)
William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple is a Scottish travel writer and historian, whose work centres chiefly on the Indian subcontinent. His first book, 1990’s In Xanadu, was an account of his journey from Jerusalem to Mongolia, travelling in the footsteps of Marco Polo. Dalrymple followed this up in 1994 with a biography of Delhi, where he had been living for the past five years, called City of Djinns, before producing his most acclaimed piece of travel writing, From the Holy Mountain. Published in 1997, the book retraces the path taken by two sixth-century monks across the Byzantine empire and was to be Dalrymple’s last travelogue to date. Since 1999, he has concentrated on detailed histories of the Indian subcontinent and, in particular, the Mughal empire. White Mughals was published in 2003, with The Last Mughal following three years later. Dalrymple has also written books on the First Anglo-Afghan War and, with Anita Anand, the Koh-i-Noor diamond. His latest book is The Anarchy, a history of the East India Company.
George Michell
George Michell obtained his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, for his dissertation on Early Chalukya temple architecture. Since then his research has ranged from surveys of town planning and Islamic buildings to studies of Hindu temple architecture and sculpture. During the 1980s and 1990s he and Dr. John M. Fritz co-directed an extensive survey of Hampi-Vijayanagara.
“The Persianate World: What is it? How did it appear? Why did it Collapse?” June 11, 2021, 2pm London (9am New York, 6:30pm Mumbai)
Richard Eaton
Richard Eaton is a professor in the University of Arizona with a primary interest in the social and cultural history of pre-modern India (1000-1800). Most recently, he has published the second volume of the new Penguin history of India, entitled India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765, which explores the long-term interaction between the Persianate and Sanskritic worlds, between the Iranian Plateau and South Asia, and between Islam and Indian religious traditions.
“Dressing in the Deccan: Clothing and Identity at the Courts of Central India”, June 25, 2021, 1pm London (8am New York, 5:30pm Mumbai)
Marika Sardar
Marika Sardar is Curator at the Aga Khan Museum, having previously worked at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Major exhibitions include Interwoven Globe (2013), focusing on the worldwide textile trade from the 16th-18th century; Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1750 (2015), examining the artistic traditions of the Muslim sultanates of central India; and Epic Tales from Ancient India (2016), looking at narrative traditions and the illustration of texts from South Asia.
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