History of Art Radio Hour with Dipti Khera

Since receiving her PhD at Columbia University on the art history of early modern South Asia, Dipti has continued her research on painted artifacts and early modern architecture emerging from western India's regions of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Her book, The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur's Painted Lands and India's Eighteenth Century was published in 2020 by Princeton University Press, and is the first to use wide-ranging artistic representations of place to trace the major aesthetic, intellectual, and political shifts in India's long eighteenth century. Particularly striking is the way her work tracks the intersections between moods, material culture, physical environments, historical memory, and territorial claims. Beyond the intimacy of the story of a city, a region, or a subfield, The Place of Many Moods raises questions about how emotions, aesthetics, and artifacts operate in constituting history and subjectivity, politics and place. She is currently writing and co-editing the catalogue that will accompany her co-curated exhibition, A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, slated to open at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art (Washington DC) in November 2022. A co-edited issue for Journal 18, 'The "Long" Eighteenth Century?,' is forthcoming in December 2021.