Kaitlin Emmanuel

I am an art historian of modern and contemporary South Asia and its diasporas, specializing in the visual cultures of Sri Lanka and its diaspora. My research interests include the relationship between politics and aesthetics, histories and theories of modernism, nationalism, the entangled histories of European imperialism in the Global South and settler colonialism in the Americas, popular culture, and studies of Global Asia. My current book project examines contemporary artworks belonging to a broadly conceived “Tamil diaspora” to parse the multiple, overlapping temporalities and geographies that emerged from the war between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (1983-2009).

I received a PhD in History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University in 2025. My most recent publication is “Visionary or Voyeur: Lionel Wendt and the Contradictions of Late Colonial Modernity in Ceylon,” (Art Journal 83:2, 2024). My writing has also appeared in Third Text, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and the Lahore Biennale 01 Reader. This year I am teaching two courses: “When Was Modernism in South Asia” (Fall 2025) and “Pop South Asia” (Spring 2026).