5. At-Large Seat #2

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.

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.