The son of a village doctor, Rutherford Alcock trained in medicine and became a battlefield surgeon, working in Portugal and Spain during the civil wars there in the 1830s. In a major career shift, he entered the consular service, went to China, and ended up as British Minister (the equivalent of today’s ambassador) to Japan…

  The art of Gandhāra—a region stretching across modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan—has often been heralded as prime example of proto-globalization: its rich and syncretic visual vocabulary that freely borrows from Hellenistic, Iranian and Indian models easily lends itself to this discourse in the early centuries of the first millennium. Aquatic imagery in Gandhāra is one…

  This talk aims to re-assess Tod's role as Political Agent in the Western Rajput States for the brief period 1818-1822 and to determine what went wrong. It will address Tod's visit to Maharaja Man Singh in Jodhpur but the focus will be on the events in Kotah in 1820-21. It will draw on Tod's…

*PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED*  

It is a sign of the growing maturity of the field of Islamic art history that there are already many introductory surveys. Some attempt to cover all regions and periods, though it is more common for these books to establish chronological and geographical boundaries. More recently, introductions to the study of Islamic material and visual…