About
Note: Nachiket Chanchani is on leave for the 2012–2013 academic year. For much of this period he will be at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. as a Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellow.
Nachiket Chanchani’s interests span many mediums, regions, and time-periods. Currently, he is researching and writing about three aspects of South Asian and Himalayan art, architecture, and visual culture. These are as follows: (1) investigating the expansion of sacred geographies, the movements of builders, and the creation of a mosaic of polities in the Central Himalayas and assessing how these activities intersected with stone temple construction and the development of sculptural form between the seventh to twelfth centuries CE (2) theorizing strategies to account for the production, dissemination, and performance of the linguistically hybrid and profusely painted scrolls and manuscripts of pre-Mughal western India and (3) tracing the shadow of traditional Indian art, modern collections, and the scholarship on them, on the creative works of avant-garde Euro-American artists.
Nachiket has been awarded several fellowships and regularly presents papers at symposia in the United States, United Kingdom, and India. He has also been closely involved with curatorial projects at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Forthcoming publications include “Telling Tales: The Freer Vasanta Vilasa” in Artibus Asiae (2012), and “The Camera Work of Ananda Coomaraswamy and Alfred Stieglitz” in History of Photography (2013).
Recent publications include “Some Reflections on Art Writing and Translation in Colonial India,” in Art in Translation 2.2 (2010): 239-252 and a review of Mary Slusser’s monograph on The Antiquity of Nepalese Wood Craft: A Reassessment in The Journal of Asian Studies 71.2 (2012): 576-578.
Published translations include (from Sanskrit and Gujarati, with Deven M. Patel) M.A. Dhaky and P.O. Sompura, “A Temple for Ascending to Heaven,” Art in Translation 2.1 (2010)): 79-86 and (from Gujarati, with Babu Suthar) “The Art of Gujarat Patronized by the Jains and its History,” Art in Translation 2.3 (2010): 261-308.
