皇家华人

Research

Aparna鈥檚 research spans modern and contemporary art in a global frame, the art and architecture of South Asia, Islamic art in South Asia, colonial photography, twentieth-century partition history, museum studies, postcolonial theory, and critical historiography. Her scholarship interrogates the role of art and art writing in the formation of postcolonial nation-states and nationalisms in the Global South. She seeks to understand the forms of cultural and epistemological violence driving the processes of colonization, nationalization, and decolonization that shape global politics today. Her work regularly converges around themes of mobility, migration, displacement and exile, and probes how art, culture, and language participate in discourses of identity and citizenship. The violence of borders and border-making is a central thread of her recent publications, and informs her deep commitment to cross-border methodologies in her writing and teaching.听

Her current book project, The Museum and its Fragments: Dispossession and Writing the Border, unearths the history of the Lahore Museum鈥檚 painful fragmentation in the twentieth century. The Lahore Museum became a central coordinate of the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, when its collections of art and archeology were divided between India and Pakistan, alongside the region鈥檚 territory, infrastructure, and peoples. This book harnesses this cross-border story to think deeply about post-colonial border-making and the impact of such processes of decolonization and division on our knowledge of art, society, and modernism. In both its narrative and form, it challenges the national logics at the core of art history in South Asia, centering the border as problem and method. By turning to the fragment, to elucidate how the materiality and mobility of the visual arts inhabit the partition鈥檚 dispossessions of place and identity, this book activates a series of archival strategies that re-envision the limits and futures of cross-border history writing.

Aparna鈥檚 research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Fulbright-Nehru Research Program, the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS), the Critical Language Scholarship Program (CLS), the Getty Foundation, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2021, her dissertation project, Partition and the Historiography of Art in South Asia, was awarded the inaugural UC Berkeley South Asia Art and Architecture Dissertation Prize. In 2023-2024, Aparna was awarded the Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in History of Art for her book project, The Museum and is Fragments.

Selected Publications

Scholarly essays

鈥淜arkhana as Method: Decentering Pedagogy on South Asian Art,鈥� in Islamic Art History and the Global Turn: Theory, Method, Practice, Radha Dalal and Hala Auji, eds (New Haven: Yale University, 2025). (forthcoming 2025)

鈥淭he Lahore Museum,鈥� in Peter Louis Bonfitto, World Architecture and Society: From Stonehenge to One World Trade (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2022), 600-606.

Review essays

鈥淒isplacement, Dislocation, and Dispossession: A Review of 鈥榋arina: Paper Like Skin鈥� at the Hammer听Museum, Los Angeles,鈥� CSW Newsletter, Center for the Study of Women, University of California, Los Angeles (Dec. 2012): 11-15.

Selected art criticism

鈥淎 Partitioned Memory: The Lahore Museum,鈥� for Artalaap: Conversations on Visual Culture, with Kamayani Sharma, Episode 13, January 2022.

Teaching and Supervision

Aparna has taught several courses on modern and contemporary art in South Asia, Islamic art, museums studies, repatriation politics, and postcolonial theory and methods in the United States and the United Kingdom, including:

HART0006: First-Year History of Art Survey
HART0144: Collecting 鈥淪outh Asia鈥� in London (Thematic Seminar)
HART0166: Repatriation in the Age of Global Dispossession
HART0172: Art and Visual Culture in Modern South Asia
HART0200: The World, the Museum, and the Colony

Aparna is especially interested in working with postdoctoral students who are researching topics in modern and contemporary South Asian art. If you are interested in doctoral supervision, please be in touch with Aparna directly (a.m.kumar@ucl.ac.uk).

Biography

Aparna Kumar is a Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Before joining UCL in 2020, Aparna was a Lecturer in Art History at 皇家华人A, and a Curatorial Research Assistant at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.