Faculty at School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Deepti Mulgund

Deepti Mulgund

Assistant Professor

School of Humanities and Social Sciences


Contact Information

19th and 20th century South Asian art, Colonialism, Museum Studies, Institutional Histories, Art Reception, Publics, and Citizenship

2019, Ph.D., School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University

2013, M.Phil., School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University

2007, Masters (Arts and Aesthetics), School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University

2005, B.M.M. (Journalism), Wilson College, University of Mumbai

Art historian, specializing in nineteenth and early-twentieth century South Asia. Deepti's work engages with museum studies, institutional histories, art reception, consumption studies, urban studies, and public culture to produce critical social histories of art.

2015-16, Fellowship by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) for a Bi-Nationally Supervised Doctoral Degree, hosted by the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (IKB), Humboldt University, Berlin

2014-2019, Junior and Senior Research Fellowship, University Grants Commission (UGC)

2013, India Foundation for the Arts Museum Fellowship (CSMVS, Mumbai).

  • 'Art Collections in Princely States,' in Twentieth Century Indian Art, eds. Partha Mitter, Parul Dave-Mukherji, and Rakhee Balaram, Thames and Hudson, Art Alive Foundation. February 2022.
  • 'The Museum at Aundh: Rewriting the Codes of Kingship, Citizenship and the Art-Museum,' in Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities, eds. Carolien Stolte and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi, Amsterdam University Press, January 2017. ISBN: 9789089648839.
  • 'Imaginaries of the Art Museum: Banaras and Aundh in Colonial India,' in Images of the Art Museum: Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology, eds. Eva-Maria Troelenberg and Melania Savino, Walter De Gruyter, March 2017, ISBN: 9783110338874.

  • The Artisan and the School-Goer: Drawing and the Continuities of 19th Century Colonial Education in India, 'Motion: Migrations: 35th World Congress of the Comit' International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA), Sao Paulo, Brazil. 2022.
  • School and Beyond: Drawing Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century Industrial Capitalism and Empire, 'Art Schools of Asia,' Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 2022.
  • Art-Viewing, Museum-going and other Tales from Colonial Pasts: Western India in the late 19th Century, Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Berlin, Germany, 2020.
  • The Social Life of Art: Art Publics in Colonial Bombay, 1850-1930s, 4A Lab: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI), Berlin, Germany, 2020.
  • Learning to See, Learning to Draw: Vision, Modernity and the Teaching of Drawing in 19th Century Bombay, Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices programme, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI), Berlin, Germany, 2019.
  • 'Civilizing Vision Education, Museum Histories and Empire, at 'Striking Back' On Imperial Fantasies and Fantasies of Empire,' Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany, 2019.
  • The JJ School of Art: The Art School and the Museum in the Colony and the Making of Visual Pedagogy, 'Design, Culture, and History: The Idea of Objects in Modern and Contemporary India,' K.R. Cama Oriental Institute, Mumbai, India. 2019.
  • Foreign Objects Between Travelling Exhibitions and Colonial Collections in Globalizing India, 'Changing Global Hierarchies of Value' Museums, Artifacts, Frames, and Flows, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, and the National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen. 2018.
  • To the Nation, To the World? Two Moments of Museum-Making in India, 'The Global Power of Private Museums: Arts and Publics, 'States and Markets,' Forum for Art Market Studies, Technical University Berlin and Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, Germany. 2017.