Tomás Harris Lecture: Sanjukta Sunderason 1 - 'Art as Archives of Decolonial Liberation'

Sanjukta Sunderason

Historian of 20th-century aesthetics at University of Amsterdam

Sanjukta Sunderason is a historian of 20th-century aesthetics, working on the interfaces of visual art, (left-wing/socialist) political thought, and historical transition during 20th-century decolonization in South Asia and across transnational formations in the Global South. She is the author of Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2020) and co-editor (with Lotte Hoek, University of Edinburgh) of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks, and Connected Histories (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her writings have appeared across multiple peer-reviewed journals including Third Text, British Art Studies, South Asian Studies, etc. She is currently working on a second monograph on transnational conceptualizations of art and liberation across 20th-century decolonization, thinking from the locational scales of South Asia. Sanjukta is based the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where is Senior Lecturer (UD1) in Art History at the University of Amsterdam. She is part of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, and coordinator of the research group Decolonial Meridians: Arts-Histories-Theories. She lectures and supervises broadly across themes of aesthetics and decolonization, global modernisms, trans-disciplinary cultural theory, postcolonial and decolonial thought.