DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Yuthika Sharma works on the visual culture of early modern and colonial South Asia and its global connections with Asia and Europe. Sharma’s publications span topics on court art, colonialism and culture, commodity trade, portraiture and object histories. Sharma’s book project, Mughal Moderns: Delhi Artists and the British Empire (1750-1911), is a critical reformulation of Late Mughal court painting in the age of East India Company’s mercantile imperialism. The project examines how artists built upon the longstanding legacy of Mughal cosmopolitanism to bridge Mughal and Company tastes and catered to the demands of the marketplace. Enacted through a dual mode of revivalism and simplicity, this practice destabilized an emerging discourse of colonial modernism that continued to privilege the aesthetic of a lost Mughal age.

Sharma maintains an active interest in collecting histories and curatorial practice through projects with the University Library, the Block Museum and the Center for the Scientific Study in the Arts. Her research has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust, The Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, and the Stanford Center for Global Studies. Sharma currently serves on the board of the American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) and on the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Collections (Oxford UP). Sharma supervises graduate students working on topics within and beyond South Asia that address the material and visual culture of empires, transregional and cross-cultural exchange. 

Her Introduction to Asian Art course has been featured in The Daily Northwestern as a “compelling” course for the Literature and Fine Arts foundational discipline requirement. 

Program Area: 18th and 19th Century, Asia, and Early Modern

Regional Specialization: South Asia

Regional Interest: Historiography of Art, Landscape History, Mughal and British Empires, and Painting and Print Culture

Selected Publications

‘To Fill ‘a Gap in Indian History’: An Archival Reckoning with the Term Company Painting,” jointly authored with Holly Shaffer. Archives of Asian Art 74, no. 1 (April 2024): 79-128.

‘Village portraits in William Fraser’s Portfolio of Native Drawings’ in Crispin Branfoot, ed. Portraiture in India since the Mughals: Art, History, Representation. I.B. Tauris, 2018, 199-220. 10.5040/9781350987579.ch-008

‘A jaghire without a crime: East India Company and the Indian Ocean Material World at Osterley 1700-1800’ with Pauline Davies in Margot Finn and Kate Smith, eds. The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857: The British country house in an imperial and global context. London: UCL Press, 2018, 88-108.

‘Beyond the Taj Mahal: Late Mughal Visual Culture, 1658-1858’ in “Modernity, Empire, Colony, Nation (1650-1950)” jointly with Chanchal Dadlani, in Finbarr Barry Flood and Gulru Necipoğlu, eds. Companion to Islamic Art Vol. II London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017, 1055-1081. 10.1002/9781119069218.ch40

Book Covers

Jas Elsner, Philippa Ardych, Nadia Ali, Robert Bracey, Katherine Cross, Dominic Daglish, Miriam Frenkel, Stefanie Lenk, Maria Lidova, Yuthika Sharma, Rachel Wood, Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, 2017.

William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma, Eds. Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi,1707-1857, Asia Society, Yale University Press, 2012.