Field of Study USA: Art History

Joshua Shelton

Joshua Shelton is a doctoral candidate in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University where he specializes in Buddhist and critical masculinities studies. His research focuses on the phenomenological textures of religious manhood in Tibetan tantra, seeking to illuminate the inflection points between masculinity as an abstract concept and manliness as an embodied enactment. His dissertation pursues these questions by attending to the life and writings of the nineteenth-century tantric virtuoso Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé, the gun-wielding, deer-hunting, beer-drinking tantric master descended from a line of “bloodthirsty bandits” in eastern Tibet.

Joshua earned his bachelor’s in religious studies and English literature at Georgetown University where his thesis on demon possession was awarded the Theta Alpha Kappa Award for excellence in undergraduate research. After college, Joshua spent two years at the Georgetown University Law Center working on his JD degree before deciding his passion for education and social service would be better served by a career in academia and activism. Joshua continued his graduate training in Buddhist studies at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder where he received the Moore Fellowship to conduct historiographic research on tantric masculinity for his master’s in Buddhist studies. At CU, he also served as the editor-in-chief for the university’s NEXT journal. He currently serves as the coordinator for the Khyentse Foundation Buddhist Studies Lecture Series at Northwestern University.

Joshua’s Fulbright-Nehru research is attending to the life, writings, and historical context of Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé. His project emphasizes the structural roles masculinity plays as both abstract ideology and embodied practice in Tibetan religious history. Ultimately, Joshua’s thesis seeks to de-essentialize masculinity by situating it within history and alongside politics, economics, and sociology. It also emphasizes the role of non-secular Indigenous cosmology in the felt textures of religious manhood.

Ava Boussy

Ava Boussy is a recent graduate of Washington and Lee University with a double major in biology and art history. She first began working with 3D modeling through Florence As It Was, a professor’s project seeking to document the churches in Florence, Italy, as a way to present and preserve spaces. While Ava learnt technical skills through this process, she also began examining ways in which new digital technology could be used to promote accessibility in academia and the arts. She then joined Professor Melissa Kerin on a research trip to Ladakh. There, she not only workshopped digital modeling in an area vastly different from Florence but also gained a better understanding of working with local populations and how they promote and protect their cultural heritage.

Ava was a member of Washington and Lee’s women’s soccer team and enjoys hiking in the Blue Ridge and reading.

Ava’s Fulbright-Nehru project is promoting awareness and accessibility of Buddhist art, specifically Ladakhi Buddhist art, by creating digital models of Buddhist shrines and temples in Ladakh. The models are being created using a combination of photographs and laser scans to create accurate representations of the sites and works, and can be viewed on most digital devices. These will serve as references for future researchers and curious learners, especially given the fact that many sites are changing due to natural degradation and planned renovation and restorations.

Sunanda Sanyal

Originally from India, Dr. Sunanda Sanyal is currently a professor of art history and critical studies at the College of Art & Design of Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has been teaching at this institution since 1999. He has a PhD in art history from Emory University (2000), an MFA in art history from Ohio University (1993), and an MFA in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego (1990).

Dr. Sanyal’s research interests include contemporary artists from former colonies in global discourses, and politics of representation and identity. He has chaired panels on contemporary artists of color at various conferences, including those of the College Art Association, the African Studies Association, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and the American Council of South and Southeast Asian Art. He has published articles and reviews of contemporary art in journals and contributed chapters to volumes of essays on art history and criticism. Some of his publications are: “Critiquing the Critique: El Anatsui and the Politics of Inclusion”, World Art (Routledge); “‘Being Modern’: Identity Debates and Makerere’s Art School in the 1960s”, A Companion to Modern African Art (Wiley-Blackwell); and “Teaching Art History at an Art School: Making Sense from the Margin”, Transforming Classroom Culture: Inclusive Pedagogical Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan). In 2009, Dr. Sanyal produced and directed a two-part documentary film, A Homecoming Spectacle, on the visual culture of Durga Pujo in Kolkata, focusing on the involvement of contemporary artists in the décor of the festival. Currently, he is also serving as a content fellow for SmartHistry.org; besides, he is working on a book project on a history of civic statuary in Kolkata, India.

Dr. Sanyal’s Fulbright-Nehru project is constructing a historical narrative across three phases of Kolkata’s civic statuary: the colonial commemoration of prominent men of the British Raj; the post-Independence celebration of the leaders of Indian freedom struggle; and the current populist trend of statues of cultural celebrities. This comparative inquiry of the three phases is tracing the evolving role of this genre of public images in shaping Kolkata’s visual and political landscapes. The aim is to locate points of overlap and divergence that illuminate the dual role of Kolkata’s public statues as both aesthetic markers and tools of political identity.

Gil Ben-Herut

Dr. Gil Ben-Herut is an associate professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. He holds a PhD in religious studies from Emory University and a BA and MA from Tel Aviv University in Israel. His research interests include premodern religious literature in the Kannada language, South Asian bhakti (devotional) traditions, translation in South Asia, and programming in digital humanities.

His book, Śiva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragaḷegaḷu (Oxford University Press, 2018), is the first study in English of the earliest Śaiva hagiographies in the Kannada-speaking region, and it argues for a reconsideration of the development of devotionalism as associated today with the Vīraśaivas. The book received the Best First Book Award for 2019 from the Southeastern Medieval Association and the 2020 Best Book Award from the Southeastern Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. Dr. Ben-Herut also received the Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award from the University of South Florida for the year 2020.

Dr. Ben-Herut recently completed co-translating selections from the Ragaḷe hagiographical collection for a book-length publication (under review). This project is funded by the American Academy of Religion’s Collaborative International Research Grant. His publications include a co-translation of a twelfth-century Kannada treatise about poetics, encyclopedic entries, a co-edited volume, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles. Dr. Ben-Herut is the co-founder of the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network, a platform for facilitating scholarly conversations about South Asian devotional traditions.

Utilizing his extensive experience in computer programming, Dr. Ben-Herut also leads several digital humanities projects, including digital ROSES and BHAVA. He is a member of the Digital India Learning Committee of the American Institute of Indian Studies and an active collaborator in digital projects about South Asian texts and languages involving open-source and open-access environments.

The textual “biography” of the vachana corpus – an expanding collection of devotional and lyrical poetry in Kannada from the twelfth century – spans over several key moments in the history of South India, starting with an innovative devotional practice of personal oral proclamations and then developing into a written canon that served as the fulcrum for a new religious sect, until finally becoming a cultural tool for biting social critique in the modern period. Dr. Ben-Herut’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining how, nine centuries after their appearance, the vachanas became the most cherished literature in Kannada and an exemplar of sorts for spiritual poetry around the world.

Lauren Bausch

Prof. Lauren Bausch teaches at Dharma Realm Buddhist University, located in the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah, California. A specialist in the philosophy of the Brāhmaṇa texts, she is interested in exploring the relationship between Vedic tradition and early Indian Buddhism. She is the editor of Self, Sacrifice, and Cosmos: Vedic Thought, Ritual, and Philosophy (2019) and has written articles such as “The Kāṇva Brāhmaṇas and Buddhists in Kosala”, “Philosophy of Language in the Ṛgveda”, and “Bráhman as the Absolute in Late Brāhmaṇa Texts”. She completed her PhD in Sanskrit from the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2015.

Including a life-changing undergraduate semester in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Delhi and three semesters of dissertation fieldwork at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Prof. Bausch has been to India to study languages, conduct research, deliver lectures, and to volunteer. She has given invited lectures at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the National Museum, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Savitribai Phule Pune University. She received the first annual International Association of Sanskrit Studies’ Honorary Research Fellowship in 2019 and organized a Vedic conference at Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.

Prof. Bausch looks forward to building a community of scholars and practitioners that facilitates collaboration among Vedic and Buddhist specialists in the United States and India. She hopes that the book resulting from this Fulbright-Nehru research touches its readers by revealing something about their roots and will also give scholars of Hinduism a more comprehensive understanding of Vedic tradition and scholars of Buddhism a sound basis for understanding the cultural background of Gotama’s teachings.

Prof. Bausch’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the philosophy of language and causality that is articulated in middle and late Vedic texts. She is identifying and examining the discourses within these texts around the nature of man and the absolute creating itself to experience relativity, while situating the philosophy of the Brāhmaṇa texts in the intellectual history of India. Rather than interpreting ritual activity through the lens of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, her research is probing the cosmologies, mythologies, and explanatory connections found throughout the Brāhmaṇa texts themselves. The results are expected to shed more light on the relationship between late Vedic thought and early Buddhism.

Ariana Pemberton

Ariana Pemberton is a PhD candidate in the History of Art department at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. Her dissertation is on ivory-carved objects from South Asia and on the Indian Ocean ivory trade, from the eighth to fifteenth centuries. Part of her research includes testing ivory objects using peptide mass fingerprinting analyses, which determine the provenance of the ivory to the species level. Ariana presented parts of her dissertation research at the Getty Graduate Symposium in January 2024 and at the University of Toronto in May 2024.

She also teaches an undergraduate course at UC Berkeley that focuses on art and material culture from the Indian Ocean World, ca. 700–1500 CE. Previously, she delivered lectures to upper-division undergraduates on “Bronze, Ivory, and Dragon’s Blood: Making the Middle Ages in the Indian Ocean World”. Ariana has also worked as a graduate student instructor in Asian Art at UC Berkeley.

In 2022, she completed her MA thesis on the Firuz Minar, a brick-and-basalt minaret built in Bengal during the 15th century, which today stands as the oldest extant monument in India patronized by an African ruler. Ariana presented this thesis at the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Madison, Wisconsin (October 2022), and at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Honolulu (March 2022). She completed her bachelor’s in art history from UC Berkeley in 2017. She has also conducted extensive fieldwork in India and has been a student of Hindi and Sanskrit.

Ivory was one of the most enigmatic materials in medieval South Asia: religious icons were carved out of ivory; rulers sat on ivory thrones; medical practitioners prescribed ivory for ailments; men and women lay on aphrodisiac ivory beds; and ivory chess pieces circulated across the Eurasian world. However, the centrality of this material transformed it into a global bio-commodity, setting into motion an ecological process that led to the endangerment of elephants. In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Ariana is writing a longue durée ecological art history of South Asian ivory.