Romita Ray

Candidate statement

Romita Ray is associate professor of art history at Syracuse University where, starting in Fall 2022, she will direct the university’s South Asia Center. She works on the art and architecture of the British Empire in India. The author of Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (Yale University Press, 2013), Ray has also published on subjects as varied as the eighteenth-century collections of Elihu Yale and botanical images of tea in eighteenth-century Britain. She is currently working on a book on the visual cultures of tea in India whose histories first evolved in eighteenth-century Calcutta and London. Provisionally titled, Leafy Wonders: Art, Aesthetics, and the Science of Tea in India, it examines the making of “Indian” tea through the trajectories of botanical history, animal studies, portraiture, architecture, and landscape studies. Her research in India, the UK, and the USA has been supported by fellowships from the NEH, the Huntington Library, the Caird Library, Yale Center for British Art, and the Lewis Walpole Library. Ray served on the planning committee of the 2014 NEASECS conference held at Syracuse University. She curated the India section of Between Worlds, Voyagers to Britain, 1700-1850 at the National Portrait Gallery in London.