Circa 1190 - The Transformation of Geopolitics through Material Culture in North India

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• published: 15 Dec 2015
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http://southasia.berkeley.edu/ A talk by Alka Patel, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, UC Irvine. Speaker Bio Alka Patel is a leading scholar of the Islamic art and architectural history of South Asia. Her scholarly publications include a monograph, articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. In 2004, EJ Brill of Leiden, The Netherlands published Dr. Patel's first book titled Building Communities in Gujarat: Architecture and Society during the Twelfth through Fourteenth Centuries. Her articles on the Islamic architecture of South Asia have appeared in Marg, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, the Getty Research Journal and other venues. Dr. Patel has been guest editor of volume XXXIV (2004) of the esteemed journal Ars Orientalis (50th-anniversary thematic volume titled Communities and Commodities: Western India and the Indian Ocean, 11th-15th Centuries), and volume LIX of Archives of Asian Art, which brought together articles on reuse in South Asia. Dr. Patel’s other edited volumes include the beautifully illustrated Architecture of the Indian Sultanates, published by Marg Publications in Mumbai, India (2006), and most recently Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition, which resulted from a conference: www.humanities.uci.edu/arthistory/indomuslimcultures. A forthcoming volume titled Ancient through Modern: India and Iran in the Longue Durée, also emerging from a conference (www.humanities.uci.edu/arthistory/india-iran-conf), is due be published in 2015. Dr. Patel has also received scholarly recognition in the form of a number of prestigious fellowships supporting her research and fieldwork. Between 2003 through 2005, she was a Senior Fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies (Chicago and New Delhi) conducting fieldwork in India toward her book The Ghurid Architecture of South Asia and Historiography at the Ends of the Islamic World, which will treat the Ghurids (ca.1149-1215), the first enduring Islamic rulership east of the Indus, and their architectural foundations throughout northern India. Dr. Patel was also a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar (2005), and most recently, she received the American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship as well as the UC President's Fellowship. Dr. Patel’s talk presented parts of her book project on the Ghurids of Afghanistan, including fieldwork she undertook in Iran and Afghanistan in 2011.