Reader in the History of South Asian Art & Archaeology
Architecture, sculpture and painting in South Asia, especially in southern India; pilgrimage, sacred geography; material religion; histories of archaeology, conservation and collecting.
Arab and early Persian painting and the arts of the Islamic book in general, including the production of manuscripts of the Qur'an; art and material culture of the Islamic world; Fatimid art and architecture; the arts of Islamic Spain; artistic contacts between the Islamic World and Europe; aspects of contemporary Islamic art.
Visual and material culture of the Korean peninsula; Pre-modern Korean burial practices, particularly of the Koryŏ period (AD918-1392); Arts of the Koryŏ period, especially bronze mirrors and ceramics; 20th century collecting of Korean artefacts; Heritage and museum practices; Gender and material culture.
Researching various aspects of contemporary art practice and display within the international arena including Diasporic art, African American art in the international arena, Black British artists, politics of curating, the role of art criticism, the relationships between contemporary art, ethnography, and the western museum.
Percival David Professor of the History of Art, Head of Department
Pictorial arts of China - especially painting and calligraphy; East Asian narrative art; canons, collecting and connoisseurship; Chinese art and modernity
Pratapaditya Pal Senior Lecturer in Curating and Museology of Asian Art
Curating, museology, and history of collections, especially in Southeast Asia and Asia more generally; debates surrounding the decolonising of museums. Buddhist and Hindu art and archaeology of Southeast Asia, especially Thailand and Laos. Indian Ocean World maritime networks and shipwrecks.
Senior Lecturer in the History of Architecture & Archaeology of the Islamic Middle East
Islamic architecture and urbanism; sociological dimensions of the art and architecture of North Africa, especially Morocco; architectural and visual theory; Islamic studies.
History of African Art; Modern and contemporary art and curating in Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean, with particular focus on Haiti and Lusophone Africa; art and the Cold War in Africa; art education and cultural policy; post-colonial theory and trans-national exhibition practice.
Southeast Asian arts, aesthetics, literatures and cultural histories, with a focus on Cambodia, from the Angkorian to the post-Angkorian to the contemporary; Theravadin Buddhist arts, literatures and ritual; cultural heritage; sexual difference; deconstruction; memory and textuality.
Chinese and Buddhist art in museums; history of Yuanmingyuan (or ‘Summer Palace’) collections; museology; colonialism and material culture; post-colonial critiques of museum representations; history and theory of collecting; art and anthropology.
Lecturer in the Arts and Visual Cultures of Modern China
Arts and visual cultures of China and the Sinophone world; cinematic arts; animation and digital media; art theory; medium and materiality; cultural flows.
He is now focusing on the evidence in Indochina for the influence of tantric or esoteric Buddhism, developed in the great monasteries of the Ganges valley and diffused and developed in different ways through much of Asia.
Founder and Director Emerita of the Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art
Dr Heather Elgood is the Course Director of the Diploma in Asian Art. She is a specialist in Persian, Jain, Sultanate and Mughal manuscript painting as well as the ritual arts of Hinduism.
Arts of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Cambodia cultural landscape; pre- and proto-historic Myanmar, Pyu and Mon culture; visual culture, social memory and sacred landscape
Professorial Research Associate & Senior Teaching Fellow
State formation; agricultural transition; urbanisation; landscape archaeology; geoarchaeology, tectonic archaeology; East Asian archaeology especially Japanese archaeology and prehistory/protohistory
History of Art & Architecture of the Muslim World, focusing on Mughal South Asia; Artistic, historic and cultural links between 17th Century Muslim South Asia and Iran, Anatolia and Europe; urbanism in Mughal South Asia.
Islamic art history, aesthetics and visual culture. Phenomenology of artworks, cognitive processes, and issues of conceptualisation of visual forms in Islam. Relation between theory and practice in Islamic artistic creation.
Modern and contemporary arts of Africa, including its histories of photography; visual and material cultures of West Africa, and their linkages to diasporic arts past and present; the arts of the Benin kingdom, masquerade, textiles and other art forms in southern Nigeria, as well as a particular focus on contemporary arts in Nigeria.