Kavita Singh

Kavita Singh is Professor of Art History at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University and was part of the founding cohort of this internationally-reputed institution that was established in 2001. Her research and teaching focus on two areas, the history of Indian courtly painting and the history and politics of museums. 

In her work on museums, Singh has been interested in understanding the place of the museum in the fraught social landscape of South Asia.  She has explored issues of heritage politics, repatriation claims, frictions and fault lines between secularization and religiosity of museum artefacts and archaeological sites, the reformulation of national art histories in the wake of Partition, and the memorialization of difficult histories in South Asia and beyond.  Her work on Indian painting has explored Rajput-Mughal interactions, stylistic eclecticism in Mughal painting, and aspects of Deccani art and she is interested in putting formalistic analyses to new uses, studying style as a system significations.

Her books include the edited and co-edited volumes New Insights into Sikh Art (Marg, 2003), Influx: Contemporary Art in Asia (co-edited with Parul Dave Mukherji and Naman Ahuja, Sage, 2013), No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia (co-edited with Saloni Mathur, Routledge, 2014), and Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt (co-edited with MirjamBrusius, Routledge 2017). Monographs include Museums, Heritage, Culture: Into the Conflict Zone (Amsterdam University of the Arts, 2015) and Real Birds in Imagined Gardens: Mughal Painting Between Persia and Europe (Getty Research Institute, 2016). She has curated exhibitions at the San Diego Museum of Art, Devi Art Foundation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the National Museum of India. The recipient of grants and fellowships from the V&A Museum, the Asia Society, the Max Planck Institute, the Getty Foundation, Getty Research Institute and the Clark Art Institute, Singh was awarded the prize for outstanding achievement in the humanities by the Infosys Science Foundation in 2019.