Dipti Khera

Candidate statement

Dipti Khera is Associate Professor in Art History and Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. As a scholar of early modern South Asia, with interdisciplinary training in art history, museum anthropology, and architecture, her research and teaching integrate longue durée perspectives and Indian Ocean and Eurasian geographies. Khera's The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur's Painted Lands and India's Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 2020, awarded American Institute of Indian Studies' Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize) reveals powerfully immersive conceptions of a place's moods. Painted by artists from Udaipur, these memorialized moods confront the ways colonial histories have recounted Oriental decadence—raising broader questions about how ecologies, emotions, and artifacts operate in constituting history and subjectivity, politics and place. Her articles have addressed Indian silversmiths' crafting of British taste; material histories of eighteenth-century pleasures; entangled mobilities and conceptual affinities between maps and scrolls that enabled long journeys. Her collaborations with Rajasthan's museums have led to conservation and digital projects, including co-curating an exhibition with Debra Diamond, A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur (Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, November 2022–May 2023). With Sarah Betzer, she will co-chair the ASECS-sponsored panel (CAA 2021), "The 'Long' Eighteenth-Century?," which will be published in Journal18.