NYU Global Asia Faculty
Special Event
Book celebration for
Dipti Khera, The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century.
Friday, December 4, 2020 at 11:00am
REGISTER HERE
 Please join the Institute of Fine Arts in conversation with Dipti Khera, Associate Professor at NYU’s Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts about her new book, which looks at the painting traditions of northwestern India in the eighteenth century, and what they reveal about the political and artistic changes of the era. It uncovers an influential creative legacy of evocative beauty that raises broader questions about how emotions and artifacts operate in constituting history and subjectivity, politics and place.

Responding to the book will be 
Vittoria Di Palma, Associate Professor of Architectural History and Art History at the University of Southern California
and
Kavita Singh, Professor of Art History at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Dipti Khera earned her Ph.D. in South Asian art history from Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology in 2013. In 2012–13, she was a postgraduate research associate and lecturer at the South Asian Studies Council, MacMillan Center, Yale University. Her book, The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2020), received the 2019 Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize for the best book manuscript in Indian Humanities, awarded annually by the American Institute of Indian Studies (http://theplaceofmanymoods.org). She is currently writing essays and entries for the catalogue that will accompany her co-curated exhibition, provisionally titled, A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, India, slated to open at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in November 2022.

Vittoria Di Palma is Associate Professor of Architecture and Art History at the University of Southern California. She specializes in modern European architectural history and theory, with particular concentrations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture, early modern land use and landscape, and contemporary landscape theory and design. Her research interests include intersections between early modern science, medicine, and aesthetics; questions of perception and representation, and broader issues in the environmental humanities. Di Palma is the author of Wasteland, A History (Yale University Press, 2014), which was awarded five prizes, including the 2016 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association, the 2016 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.

Kavita Singh is Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University where she teaches courses in the history of Indian painting, particularly the Mughal and Rajput schools, and the history and politics of museums. Singh has published on secularism and religiosity, fraught national identities, and the memorialization of difficult histories as they relate to museums in South Asia and beyond. She has also published essays and monographs on aspects of Mughal and Rajput painting, particularly on style as a signifying system. In 2018, she was awarded the Infosys Prize in Humanities and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.

We are delighted to offer a discount for Dipti Khera’s new publication – please use code TPOMM-FG for 30% off and free shipping for The Place of Many Moods through 1/15/21.