Dr Crispin Branfoot

Crispin Branfoot is historian of the arts of South Asia, with specialist interests in the religious art and architecture of southern India. 

He has studied the arts of South Asia for over 30 years. Following a degree in Ancient History and Archaeology at Manchester University, he worked for short periods at the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) and the British Museum (London), and travelled widely in South and Southeast Asia. He taught the history of Asian art alongside completing a PhD at SOAS before joining the Faculty of Art and Design at De Montfort University in Leicester (2000-5). He returned to SOAS as Lecturer in the History of South Asian art and archaeology in 2006 and was promoted to Reader in 2016. 

Many of his publications have addressed the architecture, sculpture and religious culture of the Hindu temples of the Tamil region from the fourteenth to twentieth centuries. More recent work has addressed the histories of archaeology, photography and conservation of religious architecture in south India and Sri Lanka, and the collection of south Indian sculpture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has a sustained interest in material religion, pilgrimage and Hindu religious practice. 

His most recent publications include Temple of the Heart: Imagining a Home for Vishnu in Tirukkurungudi (2027), a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of the Alakiya Nambi temple in Tirukkurungudi in the far south of India, revered by Sri Vaishnavas as one of the 108 Divya Desas (Divine Places). In collaboration with Archana Venkatesan (University of California, Davis), Leslie C. Orr (Concordia University, Montreal) and Anna L. Seastrand (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis), Temple of the Heart combines art and architectural history with the analysis of inscriptions, rituals, poetry, ornamentation and narratives in order to show the many ways in which the sacrality of a place arises and is maintained. Alongside this, he and Archana have been working with two Bangalore-based photographers, Clare Arni and Selvaprakash Lakshmanan, on a photobook series entitled Performing Devotion: the lives of temples in south India. Each book documents the loving labour and art of devotion that sustains the annual ritual cycle and festivals at an individual temple – at Tirukkurungudi, Alvar Tirunagari and Tirunelveli – in the deep south of Tamil Nadu. 

Past projects include collaborating with the historian of photography Roger Taylor on the catalogue of an exhibition, Captain Linnaeus Tripe: Photographer of India and Burma, 1852-1860, at the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (new York) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London)(2014-2015). He collaborated with colleagues at Cardiff University (Adam Hardy and Oriel Prizeman), the DRONAH Foundation, New Delhi (Shikha Jain) and the School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal (Ajay Khare) on the project, Tamil Temple Towns: Conservation and Contestation (2018-2021). This addressed pressing issues of contested heritage in the great, living temple complexes at the heart of rapidly growing cities in Tamil Nadu. Histories of archaeology, conservation and photography are central to his current book project on the Tamil temple in colonial Madras Presidency. He is a member of the advisory board for the Heidelberg Academy research project, Hindu Temple Legends in South India (2022-), that examines the Sanskrit and Tamil mythological narratives that sustain the South Indian temple town of Kanchipuram, one of the most sacred sites in Hinduism.