Professor Zirwat Chowdhury will be delivering a lecture entitled, “Transacting Empire: Family Portraits” as part of the UCSC Center for South Asian Studies 2023-2024 lecture series, Crossings.
This talk traces across the disjointed pairing of two portraits, an imperial form of kinship that emerged among covenanted servants of the East India Company in eighteenth-century Bengal. Noting the portraits’ departures from prevailing conventions in British family portraiture, the talk examines the overlapping “joint-stock” formations of domesticity and commercial partnership through which the Hastings-Hancock household accumulated and remitted its colonial wealth.
The hybrid event will take place on April 17, 2024 at 12 pm PST.
To register to attend the event via Zoom, please click here.
