Building a Legacy: Catherine Asher’s Boundary-Crossing Scholarship Remembered

To honor the legacy of Professor Catherine E.B. Asher (1946-2023), we invite short engagements with a single object, building, or text that unfold questions of central concern in Asher’s own work. Asher published transformative interventions into the way we think about histories of inter- and cross-sectarian architectural collaboration and patronage, particularly focused on the Mughal era, but extending into the present. Her intellectual probity allowed us all to re-think spaces of Hindu and Jain temples, mosques, Sufi shrines, tombs, and chattris, mining their spatial forms, their decorative and inscriptional programs, and their patronage histories to find evidence of dynamic conversations across artificially constructed disciplinary boundaries. She sought out sites and works at the margins of the canon, sponsored by sub-imperial patrons, hidden behind nondescript façades, or sited in remote rural areas, and enabled us to see those patrons, works, and sites as also central to the retelling of South Asia’s art and architectural history. She also committed herself to gathering archival material for use by Indian researchers, and her lifelong engagement with questions of heritage and preservation has become particularly poignant in the face of the erasure of Mughal history in India’s own educational system.

We welcome proposals for 6-minute presentations on an individual work, inclusive of all media, monuments, texts, and archives. Presenters may focus on South Asia or the wider Islamic world; we welcome proposals from artists as well as scholars. Collaborative and creative submissions also welcome. Please submit a title and 50-100 word abstract.