Art History Archives

David Efurd

Dr. David Efurd is associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Wofford College where he also serves as coordinator of Asian studies and co-coordinator of Ancient World studies. He teaches various courses about global artistic traditions which contribute to Wofford’s curricula in Asian studies, Chinese studies, and Middle Eastern and North African studies. He received his PhD in history of art (South Asia) from Ohio State University and his MA in art history from the University of Georgia. Dr. Efurd has also a BFA in painting and drawing from Cornell University where he began pursuing his lifelong interest in darkroom and digital photography.

With South Asia as his research field, Dr. Efurd studies early Buddhist monasteries carved directly into the stone cliffs of western India. His research encompasses interactions among peoples in the ancient western Deccan and the resulting artistic and architectural forms hewn from living rock. His present work focuses on revisiting scholarship from the era of the British Empire to later studies of Buddhist monuments. He utilizes both meticulous examination of archaeological sites and his training in the arts to foster understanding about ancient and contemporary artistic practices throughout Asia. Dr. Efurd’s other scholarly interests include digital humanities and the preservation of cultural heritage sites. He maintains an archive of photographs of caves, architecture, and Buddhist art, which is accessible to scholars all over the world.

Dr. Efurd’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining holistic design in early Buddhist architecture through data collection via photographic documentation and intensive study of an ancient monastic cave complex in western India. The project aims to offer insights into little-known architectural practices of 2000 years ago, which reflect in the extent and scope of holistic unity attempted by the cave’s creators.

Jackson Stephenson

Mr. Jackson Stephenson is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and his dissertation focuses on Esoteric Buddhist and Hindu poetry. He received his bachelor’s degree from Humboldt State University in Religious Studies, and his master’s degree in International Studies from University of Washington. Mr. Stephenson’s research focuses on the place and use of different Indian languages within Esoteric Buddhist and Hindu texts. While in India, he will be researching the “afterlife” of Esoteric Buddhist poetry in modern day bhakti communities. During this trip Mr. Stephenson plans to study Hindi intensively. He has spent extensive time in India and Nepal to study language, primarily Sanskrit, Bengali, and Tibetan, and also has facility with Prakrit and Apabhraṃśas. In the summer of 2018, he worked as Resident Director for the Critical Language Scholarship program in Kolkata, and he also regularly teaches courses at UC Santa Barbara on Buddhism and Jainism.

Mr. Stephenson has published his research on Esoteric Buddhist poetry in two peer-reviewed articles: “Love me for the Sake of the World” (2020) and “Bliss Beyond All Limit” (2021). In these articles Mr. Stephenson examined the place and use of two different genres of Apabhraṃśa verses within Esoteric Buddhist texts, showing that these verses function as both guideposts and catalysts for key experiences and junctures within Buddhist rituals. Mr. Stephenson is currently working on another article on Apabhraṃśa verses within Kashmir Śaiva texts, where these obscure verses are sung by goddesses to express ineffable and mystical teachings.

Mr. Stephenson is also interested in South Asian writing systems, inscriptions, manuscripts, and calligraphy. He wrote one of his master’s theses’ on the use of the Indic Siddhamatrika script throughout Asia, especially in Japan where it continues to be used for liturgical purposes in Shingon Buddhism. While in India Jackson also plans to take calligraphy lessons, focusing on the Siddhamatrika and Bengali scripts, in addition to ornate styles of Devanagari. Jackson also loves Indian street food.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, Mr. Stephenson is doing fieldwork for his dissertation, which explores the formal and thematic influences of medieval Buddhist poetry on modern-day bhakti communities. Mr. Stephenson is translating from key texts in Sanskrit and Apabhraṃśa while also travelling to important regions for his dissertation archive, including Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and Bihar. Mr. Stephenson is also studying regional vernaculars and consulting manuscript collections in India, in addition to reading with pundits.

Aleksandra Matic

Ms. Aleksandra Matic holds a BA in Art History from Lake Forest College and an MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, focusing on modern and contemporary art from South Asia, Gender Studies, and Cold War Constellations. During an 18-year tenure at the Art Institute of Chicago, her roles included growing and revitalizing the member and donor travel programs and overseeing the museum’s legacy society as the Associate Director of Donor Travel and the Director of the Buckingham Society. In 2019, she curated an exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago titled Coming into Being- a conversation between nine visual artists which explored questions of identity and the ‘othered’ body using post-colonial theory.

She serves on the Executive Advisory Council, Emeritus Board, for the Educational Travel Consortium. Ms. Matic volunteers for various culture, health, and community-focused organizations, including the Artists of Nathdwara, Core of Culture, and Center on Halsted. She is an active member of The Arts Club of Chicago and the International Museum of Surgical Science. Ms. Matic enjoys travelling, reading, and volunteering in her free time.

This Fulbright-Nehru project in India is a collaboration with a multigenerational collective of pichvai artists in the temple town of Nathdwara. Pichvai are decorative textiles utilized by a Hindu devotional community called the Pushtimarg in their veneration of Lord Krishna. The focus of Ms. Matic ’s proposal involves working with a local filmmaker to produce a documentary based on the lives of these pichvai artists, the history of their painting, and Nathdwara. This documentary will communicate a crucial narrative and create dialogue within a global community to provide the platform needed for future pichvai artists to create and thrive for generations.

Janani Mandayam Comar

Ms. Janani Comar is a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Department of Religion. Her research is at the intersection of religion, caste, and performance. She is particularly interested in the way mythological narratives engage in ethical discourses. Her dissertation looks at hagiographies of mythic figures in colonial South India, and she traces the circulation of their narratives through print and performance. At University of Toronto, she holds the Connaught International Doctoral Scholarship and was a recipient of the MITACS Research Training Award in 2020. She has presented her research at several conferences, including the annual South Asia Conference held at University of Wisconsin Madison.

For the Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Comar aims to revisit the history of modern Hinduism to explore how religion and ethics are intimately linked to social status in the colonial period. Working with scholars at the French Institute of Pondicherry, she is focusing on the writings of subaltern Tamil-speaking communities and explore how these groups participated in lively ethical debates through performance. She is also accessing a wide range of archival sources, including from contemporary performers, to trace how narratives about virtuous figures circulated in rural and urban areas. Her findings will be an integral part of her doctoral dissertation on Tamil literature and performance.

Christopher LaMountain

Mr. Christopher LaMountain is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he pursued a double major in Religious Studies and Music Performance Studies. After being awarded an Undergraduate Research Grant from Northwestern in 2018, Mr. LaMountain completed a multi-media research project comparing gynecological texts of Mediterranean Antiquity with Marian narratives of the New Testament Apocrypha. In the latter portion of his collegiate career, Mr. LaMountain conducted research on devotional music at seven of the eight continental Baha’i Houses of Worship as the 2019 Northwestern Circumnavigator grantee. Having sung in choirs and as a classically trained tenor soloist, Mr. LaMountain also sung with the musicians of Baha’i Temples around the world and subsequently produced his honors undergraduate thesis comparing the musical styles and presentation forms of devotional music at the different Baha’i Temples. With the help of his colleagues from the Bienen School of Music, Mr. LaMountain has also presented two concert lectures on his comparative Baha’i musicological studies, which featured musical excepts from his worldwide research trip. Interested in inter-religious musicology and cross-cultural studies, Mr. LaMountain has achieved proficiency in French, Italian, and Hindi, passed upper-level courses on various traditions of the major world religions, and studied musical traditions, such as Negro Spiritual, Western Classical, Hindustani, Ugandan traditional, and Nueva Cancion Chilena musical styles. Mr. LaMountain aspires to pursue a graduate degree in sacred music studies, become a religious studies and musicology professor, and continue singing in choirs over the course of his life.

With his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mr. LaMountain is both observing and participating in the process of devotional music making at the prayer services of the Asian Baha’i House of Worship, called the Lotus Temple. In comparing both these observed musical styles and presentational forms of the Lotus Temple with other faith spaces in Delhi, for example Akshardham and ISKCON Temples, Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, Myanmar Buddha Temple, and Moti Masjid, Mr. LaMountain is determining the manner in which local worship music from religious traditions outside of the Baha’i Faith influences intonation of the Lotus Temple.

Rhône Grajcar

Mr. Rhône Grajcar graduated from Whitman College in 2021 with a Bachelor of Arts in History and South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies. At Whitman he explored South Asian religions and US foreign policy, culminating in eight months spent in India on a David L. Boren Scholarship. He has followed his interests to internships at the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the South Asia Practice at the Albright Stonebridge Group. He is eager to deepen his understanding of South Asia religions and contribute to the study of shrines during his Fulbright-Nehru grant.

Mr. Grajcar’s Fulbright-Nehru project involves ethnographic field work at Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki Dargah in New Delhi and Dargah Yousoufain in Hyderabad, within the dargahs’ compounds. By engaging the dargah attendees in conversation, the project seeks to understand how COVID-19 and its impacts on daily life have affected the sense of community dargahs are renowned for. These shared spaces rely on crowded gatherings and communal food during langar to build their inclusive potentialities, which will present challenges in a post-COVID world. Situating the project in the understanding of dargahs as discursive, rather than fixed spaces, Mr. Grajcar hopes to help capture how these resilient institutions and their exploratory authority weather the disruptions of the pandemic.

Christian Novetzke

Prof. Christian Novetzke received a BA from Macalester College, an MTS from Harvard University, and a PhD from Columbia University. Prof. Novetzke is Professor of South Asia Studies, Religious Studies, and Global Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is also Professor of the Comparative History of Ideas at UW. Prof. Novetzke’s books include The Quotidian Revolution (Columbia University Press 2016) and Religion and Public Memory (Columbia University Press 2008). He is also the co-author (with Andy Rotman and William Elison) of Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Harvard University Press 2016) and co-editor (with Jack Hawley and Swapna Sharma) Of Bhakti and Power (University of Washington Press 2019). Among his awards, Prof. Novetzke was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018 and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow in 2013. His current projects include a book on yoga as political theory and practice with co-author Sunila S. Kale (under contract at Columbia University Press) and a book on the thought of Savitribai Phule, for which he was awarded the current Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.

Savitribai Phule was born into an impoverished subaltern caste of Shudra agricultural workers in India in 1831. She became one of the first Shudra women in India to receive an education. She authored two books of political poetry in Marathi, each articulating her powerful vision for social justice and her fight against caste patriarchy. Her ideas about religion, caste, gender, and power made her one of the most important critical thinkers in Indian history. However, Savitribai Phule is hardly known outside of India. With Fulbright-Nehru’s support Prof. Novetzke hopes to complete his research on a book on the critical thought of Savitribai Phule.

Rebecca Manring

Prof. Rebecca Manring’s adventures in India began with no visible trajectory. Her fascination with the country led her to seek out language instruction, and she found a Bengali teacher in her home town of Seattle. After working privately with her for a year, she began to study Sanskrit as one of the perks of employment at the University of Washington. She was quickly “hooked” and gained formal admission to the graduate program in Asian Languages and Literatures in 1985. Eventually, she realized that she could earn a living working with the languages, and the culture, she had come to love. In 1996, she joined the faculty of Indiana University as the first hire, after the founding director, in its new India Studies program, where she initially taught Sanskrit and Hindi, and soon added courses in literature, cinema, and religious studies. Prof. Manring’s position converted to tenure track in 2000. She was awarded tenure in 2007 and promoted to Full Professor in 2018. Her research on hagiographical literature in premodern Bengal resulted in the publication of two books. The research for those books was largely based on unpublished manuscripts, and the search for those manuscripts led her to many unforeseen places. Most notable was the private collection of the late noted linguist Sukumar Sen. His son Subhadra Kumar Sen allowed her access to those manuscripts, and eventually, granted Prof. Manring permission to microfilm them, as they both recognized their precarious condition. As they were cleaning and cataloguing those manuscripts, they found a complete manuscript of Rūparāma Cakravartī’s Dharma-maṇgala, and made plans to complete his father’s work of critically editing the text, and then producing an English translation. The second Prof. Sen died before they could make much of a start on that project, and so in his memory and homage she has completed the translation. Now, she wants to see what the text means to the people for whom it is important, and so she is embarking upon the final phase of the work with this text, namely, this ethnographic work.

Prof. Manring’s Fulbright-Nehru project proposes to continue the exploration of the contemporary ritual applications of Rūparāma Cakravartī’s mid-17th century Dharma-maṅgala, coupled with her translation and analysis of the text, will contribute to their understanding first of the breadth of pre-modern theological anthropology of Bengal, by which she means how people lived out their rituals and devotion to their chosen deities; and second, of how those practices extend into the 21st century.

Bengali maṅgala-kāvya have much to say about non-brahminical religious praxis and illuminate our understanding of daily rural life in the pre-colonial era, providing a means for expressing non-brahmanical views and values. Moreover, the performative nature of ritual life allowed and continues to allow lower groups in the normative hierarchy a place of power and importance.

William Elison

Prof. William Elison studied at Williams College and received a PhD in the history of religions from the University of Chicago. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in Hinduism and related traditions as observed in India in the present day, mostly in vernacular languages, mostly among non-elite people.

As an urban ethnographer, he is committed to an ongoing program of research in the streets and poor neighborhoods of Mumbai. The first book-length product of this research, The Neighborhood of Gods, came out in 2018 from the University of Chicago Press. It examines how slum residents and other marginalized groups use religious images to mark and settle urban space. One of its main arguments is that sacred space is created according to a visual and somatic praxis observed across religious traditions. At the same time, it recasts, in a modern context, a question central to the history of Hindu thought: If the divine is manifest in the phenomenal world, then where and in what form do we recognize God? And with what sort of insight or authority?

Related research interests have included Adivasi (“tribal” or ST) communities; Indian slum neighborhoods and their village roots; and the mediation of darshan, or visual worship, by the movies and other technologies. From his student days, Prof. Elison has looked to Hindi popular cinema— “Bollywood”— for a window into modern Indian culture. His book on the landmark 1977 film Amar Akbar Anthony, coauthored with Christian Novetzke and Andy Rotman, was released in 2015 by Harvard University Press.

He has recently become interested in exploring the literary possibilities of ethnographic writing. His Fulbright-Nehru project this year intends to advance the next step in his fieldwork inquiry into religious life in Mumbai slum colonies.

A multisite ethnography of religious life in Mumbai slum communities. By “slum” Prof. Elison means housing consisting of unauthorized structures. Over half Mumbai’s population lives in such neighborhoods. By “religion” he means cults of local, territorial gods and divinized figures. This is a stratum of practice long associated with “village Hinduism” that Prof. Elison will demonstrate is a) observed in urban India; and b) not confined to Hindus. He will study gods as brokers of blessings and resources that flow into communities: vitality, cash, respect. Over a total of six months, Prof. Elison seeks to pursue simultaneous inquiries in three or more neighborhoods. His method is qualitative participant observation.

Sarah Levenstam

Sarah Levenstam is pursuing a doctoral degree in the anthropology of religion at the University of Chicago, Divinity School, in Chicago, Illinois. She holds an MA in religious studies, also from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, and a dual BA in religious studies and anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Sarah’s doctoral dissertation examines ideas and practices of dog management and care across India and Britain against the backdrop of imperial and national public works projects, international humanitarianism, and transnational animal welfare movements from 1857 through the present.

At the University of Chicago, Sarah’s research has been generously supported by the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS), the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Divinity School. She has received Critical Language Scholarships, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, COSAS Fellowships, and an American Institute of Indian Studies Scholarship for language studies in Bangla, Urdu, and Sanskrit. She has previously worked in international education at World Learning, in historical and archival research for Hudson Institute, and in accessibility advocacy and community outreach with Rubin Museum of Art and the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions. She also fosters dogs for an animal shelter in Chicago.

Sarah’s Fulbright-Hayes research is tracing the transformation of the legal status of free-roaming dogs from straying “ferae naturae”, contained and culled in 19th-century colonial Calcutta, to legally-recognized “street dogs” who have accrued material and moral value in today’s Kolkata. She is looking at how dogs have inhabited this changing city and how the metrics of evaluating them as valuable or disposable have changed with time. She is also studying what the connected histories of dogs and humans together navigating this city’s public spaces reveal about cross-species hierarchies, practices of place-making, and claims of belonging in Kolkata.