Dr Aparna Kumar

Research

Aparna’s research spans modern and contemporary art in a global frame, the art and architecture of South Asia, Islamic art in South Asia, colonial photography, twentieth-century partition history, museum studies, postcolonial theory, and critical historiography. Her scholarship interrogates the role of art and art writing in the formation of postcolonial nation-states and nationalisms in the Global South. She seeks to understand the forms of cultural and epistemological violence driving the processes of colonization, nationalization, and decolonization that shape global politics today. Her work regularly converges around themes of mobility, migration, displacement and exile, and probes how art, culture, and language participate in discourses of identity and citizenship. The violence of borders and border-making is a central thread of her recent publications, and informs her deep commitment to cross-border methodologies in her writing and teaching. 

Her current book project, The Museum and its Fragments: Dispossession and Writing the Border, unearths the history of the Lahore Museum’s painful fragmentation in the twentieth century. The Lahore Museum became a central coordinate of the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, when its collections of art and archeology were divided between India and Pakistan, alongside the region’s territory, infrastructure, and peoples. This book harnesses this cross-border story to think deeply about post-colonial border-making and the impact of such processes of decolonization and division on our knowledge of art, society, and modernism. In both its narrative and form, it challenges the national logics at the core of art history in South Asia, centering the border as problem and method. By turning to the fragment, to elucidate how the materiality and mobility of the visual arts inhabit the partition’s dispossessions of place and identity, this book activates a series of archival strategies that re-envision the limits and futures of cross-border history writing.

Aparna’s research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Fulbright-Nehru Research Program, the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS), the Critical Language Scholarship Program (CLS), the Getty Foundation, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2021, her dissertation project, Partition and the Historiography of Art in South Asia, was awarded the inaugural UC Berkeley South Asia Art and Architecture Dissertation Prize. In 2023-2024, Aparna was awarded the Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in History of Art for her book project, The Museum and is Fragments.

Selected Publications

Journal articles

“Unsettling the National: My East is Your West, Venice Biennale and After Midnight, Queens Museum, New York,” in Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 3 (2015): 142-150.

Book chapters and edited volumes

“The Lahore Museum,” in Peter Louis Bonfitto, World Architecture and Society: From Stonhenge to One World Trade (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2022), p. 600-606.

Book and exhibition reviews 

“Infrastructure, Nation, and Excess,” Book Review of Karin Zitzewitz, Infrastructure and Form (2022) and Monica Juneja and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds. Motherland: Pushpamala N.’s Woman and Nation (2022), Art History (Jun/Jul 2023). 

 “Book Review: Anindya Raychaudhuri, Narrating South Asian Partition: Oral History, Literature, Cinema,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 80, No. 4 (Nov 2021), 1114-1115. 

Exhibition texts

At the Crossroads: Qandahar in Images and Empire, co-authored with Alka Patel and Frances Terpak, for the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in partnership with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, 2022.

Encyclopedic entries, podcasts, and online essays

“How partition divided a centuries-old manuscript between India and Pakistan—and continues to plague the region’s heritage,” co-authored with Vivek Gupta, for The Art Newspaper, 12 Aug 2022.

“Partition and the Historiography of Art in South Asia,” Photo Essay for South Asia Art and Architecture Initiative Spring Newsletter, UC Berkeley, Feb 2022.

“A Partitioned Memory: The Lahore Museum,” for Artalaap: Conversations on Visual Culture, with Kamayani Sharma, Episode 13, January 2022.

“Imran Qureshi,” Grove Art Online (Oxford: Oxford University, 2015). 

Teaching and Supervision

Aparna has taught several courses on modern and contemporary art in South Asia, Islamic art, museums studies, repatriation politics, and postcolonial theory and methods in the United States and the United Kingdom, including:

HART0006: First-Year History of Art Survey
HART0144: Collecting “South Asia” in London (Thematic Seminar)
HART0166: Repatriation in the Age of Global Dispossession
HART0172: Art and Visual Culture in Modern South Asia

Aparna will be on research leave for AY 2023-2024 and is not currently accepting applications for doctoral or postgraduate supervision.
 
 

Biography

Aparna Kumar is a Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South. She received her Ph.D. in Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Before joining UCL in 2020, Aparna was a Lecturer in Art History at UCLA, and a Curatorial Research Assistant at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. In 2023-2024, Aparna will be a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art.