Zirwat Chowdhury’s research and teaching explore the interconnected histories and historiographies of art and visual culture in Britain, France, South Asia, and the Atlantic world in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her first book, Enlightened Relations: Imperial Power and Artistic Form in 18th-Century Britain is forthcoming with Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Her research has been supported by the New Foundation for Art History, Hellman Society of Fellows at UCLA, Getty Research Institute (NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship), William Andrews Clark Memorial Library/Center for 17th– and 18th-Century Studies at UCLA (Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship), Institute of Historical Research (Mellon Dissertation Fellowship), Huntington Library (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship), Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, and the Yale Center for British Art. She is also an alumna of the Attingham Summer School (’13) and Royal Collection Studies (’18).
Dr. Chowdhury served as Journal 18’s Notes & Queries Editor from 2019-2021.
Prior to joining the Department of Art History at UCLA, she taught at Reed College and Bennington College. She also served as the Community Development Director for the Town of Bennington in Vermont.
Education
Ph.D. Northwestern University, Art History, 2012
Research
Dr. Chowdhury’s first book, Enlightened Relations: Imperial Power and Artistic Form in 18th-Century Britain will be published in Spring 2027 by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. The book explores a selection of the multi-figure compositions that proliferated across British painting and printmaking. Works by Arthur Devis, Francis Hayman and Joshua Reynolds represent figures associated with British imperial geographies, depicted by artists who never themselves travelled beyond the Mediterranean world. Building on a hitherto-neglected theorization of power within Lockean thought as the extensibility rather than the unilateral force of bodies, the discussion provides a generative framework for considering how artistic form in such works could resonate with the social. In re-evaluating Enlightenment philosophy and art theory, it opens the way for a fresh consideration of the capacity of artworks to generate experience and not merely represent it. These images could – and still can – convey much of the joys, banalities, or vagaries of living within the ordinary relations of power that informed the extraordinary scale of mid-eighteenth-century imperial occupation.
Articles
- “The joint-architecture of the char.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 15, no. 3 (2025).
- “The Imperial Landscape of 18th-CenturyAnglo-Indian Portraiture,” in The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History, eds. Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martin, and Charlene Villaseñor Black (Routledge, 2023), 385-397.
- “The Sovereign Betel in Eighteenth-Century Bengal and Bihar,” in Things Change: Art and Material Culture in the Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Kristel Smentek and Wendy Bellion (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), 133-157.
- “Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Population Figures,” in Getty Research Journal 17 (2023): 107-124.
- “Ces pendants, Cependant,” H-France Forum 17, no. 5 (2022).
- “A Questionnaire on Global Methods,” October, no. 180 (Spring 2022): 3-17.
- “Rabble, Rubble, Repeat.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 51 (2022): 267-273.
- “George Dance the Younger Sets Guildhall Alight,” Journal18 Issue 11: The Architectural Reference (Spring 2021).
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“Blackness, Immobility & Visibility in Europe: A Digital Collaboration,” Journal18 (September 2020).
- “An Imperial Mughal Tent and Mobile Sovereignty in Eighteenth-Century Jodhpur,” Art History 38, no. 4 (September 2015): 668-681.
- “Lemonade’s Enlightenment.” Journal18 (July 2016).
Selected Links
- “Blackness, Immobility & Visibility in Europe (1600-1800) – A Collaborative Timeline,” Journal18 (September 2020).
