Iftikhar Dadi, associate professor of history of art, has received a $238,000 grant from the Getty Foundation's Connecting Art Histories initiative for a series of research seminars. The project, “Connecting Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia,” is a collaboration between Cornell’s Institute of Comparative Modernities (ICM), the Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh, and Asia Art Archives in Hong Kong.
The project brings together leading international faculty and emerging scholars to investigate the artistic and cultural histories of modern South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa.
“These regions possess rich and multifaceted histories of art and visual culture during the 20th century, but numerous key topics remain unexamined,” Dadi said. “We are especially interested in supporting research and teaching by junior scholars based in these regions.”
Other faculty in the project include Elizabeth Giorgis of Addis Ababa University; Salah Hassan, the Goldwin Smith Professor of African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture in the Africana Studies and Research Center and the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell; Simon Soon of the University of Malaya; Sanjukta Sunderason of the University of Leiden; and Ming Tiampo of Carleton University. The co-organizers are Diana Campbell Betancourt of the Dhaka Art Summit and John Tain of the Asia Art Archive.
The faculty, emerging scholars, and organizers will meet twice for 10 days each: in Hong Kong in August 2019 at the Asia Art Archive, and at Dhaka during Dhaka Art Summit in February 2020. Additional distance learning sessions will also be held during 2019-20.
Dadi is co-director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities and director of the South Asia Program.
