Speakers

Cloth that Changed the World: Histories and Contemporaneity of Kalamkari Making, April 8th at 2 PM London (9 AM New York, 6:30 PM Mumbai)

Sarah Fee

Sarah Fee is Senior Curator of Global Fashion and Textiles at the Royal Ontario Museum, and teaches in the Art History Department of the University of Toronto. She holds graduate degrees in anthropology and African studies from Oxford University and INALCO, Paris. Her research and publications focus on textile making, gifting and trading in Madagascar and the wider western Indian Ocean world. In 2020 she was lead curator of the exhibition, ‘Cloth that Changed the World. The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintz’ and edited the companion publication (2020, ROM-Yale University Press).

Rajarshi Sengupta

Rajarshi Sengupta is a practitioner and art historian, presently teaching at the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, India (2021-). Sengupta completed his PhD in art history from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2019), and received the IARTS Textiles of India Grant, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2017-18). He contributed to the catalogue essay of Cloth that Changed the World: The Art and Fashion of Indian Chitnz, edited by Dr. Sarah Fee, and presently working on an edited book on Deccani material culture with Dr. Baishali Ghosh.

The City of Haidar as a Shiʿi Paradise:Divine Sovereignty, Built Space, and Shiʿi Materiality in Qutb Shahi Hyderabad, April 29th at 2 PM London (9 AM New York, 6:30 PM Mumbai)

Karen Ruffle

Karen Ruffle is Associate Professor of South Asian Islam in the Departments of Historical Studies and Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on devotional texts, ritual practice, and Shiʿi material practices in South Asia. Her books include Everyday Shiʿism in South Asia (2021) and Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism (2011). Her current projects include a monograph titled, Building the City of Haider: Kingship, Urban Space, and Shiʿi Ritual in Qutb Shahi Hyderabad and a large-scale study of South Asian Shiʿi material culture and sensorial practices titled, Barakah Bodies: Shiʿi Materiality, the Sensorium, and Ritual in India and Pakistan.

Eclipsed by the Moon: Mahlaqa Bai and Khushhal Khan Anup in Nizami Hyderabad, May 6th at 1 PM London (8 AM New York, 5:30 PM Mumbai)

Katherine Butler Schofield

Katherine Butler Schofield is a historian of music and listening in early modern North India and the Deccan, based at King’s College London. In telling stories about lives in music, she writes on sovereignty and selfhood, affection and desire, sympathy and loss, and power, worldly and strange. Her latest book, Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858, will be out with Cambridge University Press in 2022. Her previous edited volumes are Tellings and Texts with Francesca Orsini (Open Book, 2015) and Monsoon Feelings with Margrit Pernau and Imke Rajamani (Niyogi, 2018).

The Vīraśaivas / Liṅgāyats of 12th century Karnataka: Conflict, Transformation, and the Genesis of a New Creed, May 20th, at 1 PM London (8 AM New York, 5:30 PM Mumbai)

Tiziana Lorenzetti

Graduating from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, Tiziana Lorenzetti obtained her PhD. in ‘History of the Art of India and Oriental Asia’ from the ‘University of Genoa (Italy)’. She was Postdoctoral Fellow at ‘National Museum Institute of the History of Art’, New Delhi, and Lecturer in Indian Art and Culture at the Sapienza of Rome. She is now director of the International Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS). Her publications include Understanding the Hindu Temple. History, Symbols and Forms, Studies in Asian Art and Culture (SAAC), Berlin, 2015; Hindu Sculpture. Religion Mythology and Art at the Archaeological Museum of Khajuraho, Sampark Publishing House, Calcutta, 2016 (2nd ed.); Voices of Freedom: Society, Culture and Ideas in the 70th year of India’s Independence. ismeo, Rome, 2020, (editor).

Reflections of Jaina and Vīra-Śaiva Interactions in the Art and Architecture of Karnataka, June 3rd at 1 PM London (8 AM New York, 5:30 PM Mumbai)

Julia AB Hegewald

Julia A. B. Hegewald graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, from where she also obtained her PhD. After postdocs in Oxford and Heidelberg, she was Lecturer and then Reader at the University of Manchester. She is now Professor and Head of the Department of Asian and Islamic Art History at the University of Bonn. Besides other book publications, she is the author of Water Architecture in South Asia: A Study of Types, Developments and Meanings (2002); Jaina Temple Architecture in India: The Development of a Distinct Language in Space and Ritual (2009; Indian reprint 2018), Jaina Tradition of the Deccan: Shravanabelagola, Mudabidri, Karkala (2021) and editor of The Jaina Heritage: Distinction, Decline and Resilience (2011)

A Cosmopolitan yet Local Tradition: Glazed Tiles in the Deccani Sultanates, June 17th at 1 PM London (8 AM New York, 5:30 PM Mumbai)

Arthur Millner

Arthur Millner is a consultant in Islamic, Indian, Himalayan and South-East Asian art, based in London. He studied at Queens’ College, Cambridge and SOAS, University of London. He started his career at Sotheby’s and later had a gallery in London. He has spent the last fifteen years working independently, advising collectors and auction rooms, as well as lecturing and writing. He has written two books: Damascus Tiles (2015) and, most recently, Indian Tiles (2021).