XClose

History of Art

Menu

UCL History of Art’s Dr Aparna Kumar Awarded 2023 Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship

23 March 2023

Awards Recognise Early-Career Scholars Whose Research Advances the Field of Art History

Lahore museum in Pakistan with a lady stood in front - taken by Aparna Kumar 2014

UCL History of Art is proud to announce that Dr Aparna Kumar, Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South, has been awarded a 2023 Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art.

The 2023 fellows employ diverse, interdisciplinary approaches to art historical research, with projects that intersect with religious studies, cultural heritage studies, material sciences history, and environmental justice. The fellowship includes a $60,000 stipend and an additional $5,000 for travel and research. The awards are non-residential, allowing these emerging scholars to pursue their research anywhere in the world. This program is made possible by a major grant from Getty and administered by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

Kumar has been recognised as one of ten outstanding early-career art historians from around the world whose innovative scholarship stands to make substantial and original contributions to the understanding of art and its history. A distinguished committee of diverse senior scholars with wide-ranging expertise selected this year’s fellows for their capacity to expand the field of art history and explore previously understudied regions of the world.

Kumar will use the fellowship to complete her first monograph, The Museum and its Fragments: Dispossession and Writing the Border. This project unearths the painful fragmentation of the Lahore Museum in the twentieth century, which became a central coordinate of the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent when its collections of art and archaeology were divided between India and Pakistan. Her book harnesses the cross-border story of this museum and its objects to problematise the national logics at the core of art history in South Asia and to think deeply about post-colonial border-making and the impact of such processes of decolonisation and division on global knowledge of art, society, and modernism. (Full abstract here).

 “We are pleased to recognize this extraordinary group of fellows, whose work sheds light on how humans make meaning through images and design,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly.

Biography

Research Aparna Kumar in a coat
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. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary South Asian art, twentieth-century partition history, museum studies, and postcolonial theory. Kumar’s research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Fulbright-Nehru Research Program, the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS), the Critical Language Scholarship Program, and the University of California, Los Angeles. 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 2021.

Related News