Dr Natasha Eaton

Lecturer

18th- and 19th-century
British art

Email: n.eaton@ucl.ac.uk
 

Dr Natasha Eaton teaches 18th- and 19th- century British art and the visual culture of South Asia. She received her doctorate at the University of Warwick and since then she has held a Leverhulme scholarship at the Centre for Social Studies, Calcutta; the Nehru Trust/V&A Award, Hyderabad and New Delhi; the Simon Fund Fellowship in Social Sciences, Manchester University; the Freer Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian and Islamic art at the University of Michigan and a Yale/Society for 18th-century Studies scholarship at the Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven.
She was awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Trust Prize, 2009-2011 which has enabled her to undertake fieldwork in West Bengal and the Andaman Islands in relation to the contested and contingent status of museums, emergency and exception in India, c.1814 to the present. In 2011-12 she was awarded The Paul Mellon Centre Author’s Grant; The Paul Mellon Centre Publisher’s Grant (Duke University Press); The Paul Mellon Centre Educational Grant (Walkabout – A symposium in honour of Professor Michael Rosenthal) and The Paul Mellon Centre Research Travel Grant, alongside a publications grant from the Historians of British Art Association.

Her first book Mimesis in Flux: Artworks, Networks, Empires, in India 1765-1860 (125, 000 words, funded by The Getty and the Paul Mellon Centre) will be published in the ‘Objects/Histories: Critical perspectives on art, material culture and representation’ series edited by Nicholas B.Thomas, Duke University Press, 2013. Mimesis in Flux focuses on the visual and mimetic entanglements of the Mughal Empire and the English East India Company with an emphasis on the agency of images in the formation of a vertiginous, hybrid aesthetic and its relationship with creole governmentality in South Asia.

Also to be published in 2013 is Natasha’s second monograph, Colour, Art and Empire (125,000 words, I.B.Tauris- a project awarded a Clark Art Institute Fellowship), which questions the agency of color as excess, magic, waste and as technologically clandestine in relation to the material, artistic, physiological and philosophical practices of the Mughal and British empires, Indian nationalism and postcoloniality. She is contracted to Ashgate to produce a smaller monograph on tourism and the visual culture of the British Empire.

Natasha’s present research includes a number of essays/articles which address the space for magic in the colony with an emphasis on Indo-Islamic books of divination (fal name); Sufi and colonial visual tourism; the technological excess/obsolescence of the panorama; missionary (ab)uses of the concepts of iconoclasm and idolatry as strategies for collecting of art objects qua iconoclash and the contested juridical status of Hindu gods and goddesses in 19th-century India.

Natasha is really interested in supervising MA and doctoral theses concerned with the visual cultures of South Asia and/or 18th- to 20th- century Britain and the British Empire; the relationship between material culture and visual ethnography; the problematics/enchanted technologies of colour and the poetics, affect/governance of collecting.

Selected Publications

Publications

A list of publications is available from UCL's Institutional Research Information Service via the Iris link below.

Page last modified on 07 nov 12 11:40