Mrinalini Rajagopalan - Writing Begum Samru: Meditations on Form and Method
How does one write about the past from a feminist place in the present? This is a methodological question that I have grappled with in writing my most recent book, Marks She Made: The Art and Architecture of Begum Samru (forthcoming from Manchester University Press). In this talk I share how feminism operates as heuristic lens, a compositional framework, citation strategy, and narrative locus within the book.
About the Speaker
Mrinalini Rajagopalan is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a historian of the built environment of modern India and is particularly interested in the impact of colonialism and nationalism on the architectural and urban forms of the subcontinent. Her most recent book Marks She Made: The Art and Architecture of Begum Samru will be published by Manchester University Press in Spring 2026.
This talk will be in conversation with Holly Shaffer. Holly Shaffer is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. She specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth century art and architecture in South Asia and Britain. She earned her doctorate in the History of Art from Yale University in 2015, and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Dartmouth College from 2015 to 2017. Her current book project interprets the eclectic arts produced in the western Indian city of Pune in the eighteenth century and their dissemination in print in the nineteenth century. Other projects include studies of ephemeral arts, such as light, cuisine, architectural models, and scent in the northern Indian region of Awadh; and of 19th-century European representations of India that went viral.
Speakers
- Humanity