The Department of History and Art History is excited to introduce our newest faculty member, Dr. Deepthi Murali! Deepthi is an art historian of South Asia and digital humanist with a specialization in 18th and 19th century decorative arts. Her work examines networks of production, circulation, and use of wood and ivory objects from southwestern India and cotton textiles from southeastern India. Through the study of these lesser-known objects, her research traces South India's material and artistic connections with the Indian Ocean World and beyond.
Her work focuses on developing novel methodologies that bridge the disciplines of art history, material culture history, public history and digital humanities. Her current project, Connecting Threads: Global Histories of Checked Indian Cotton Textiles, is a collaborative Digital Humanities (DH) project. Deepthi is also Co-Principal Investigator for the HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium (HCAC), a digital public history initiative by The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Deepthi’s work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Arts & Humanities Research Council, Mellon Foundation, American Institute of Indian Studies, and Yale Center for British Art.
Deepthi started at Mason as a postdoctoral fellow at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) in 2020 and will continue as affiliate faculty at RRCHNM. We had a chance to sit down and learn more about Deepthi’s work and teaching recently.
Your Connecting Threads project just launched! Tell me a little bit about that?
Connecting Threads is a collaborative digital history project that looks at the history of the Madras handkerchief, an internationally popular dress accessory made of brightly colored checked cotton produced in South India in the 18th and 19th centuries and used by communities of color in the Greater Caribbean Region including the coastal southeastern US. The project objective is to produce original research and scholarship on understudied textile traditions and offer them to a public audience. Our website hosts a digital exhibition, a database, lesson plans for educators, as well as an extensive bibliography attached to Indian textiles in Caribbean markets. The digital nature of the project allows us to make this research accessible to a global public and we have collaborators from across the world. You will see this particularly in the symposium we just hosted at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
In 2025, we will be adding more historical data to our database as well as producing some really cool data visualizations. We just received a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to do this work. In the next couple of years, we hope to continue to build on this collaborative network to delve more into histories of checked Indian cotton textiles used in parts of Asia and Africa.
What courses have you been teaching? How do they connect with your research?
This semester I have been teaching History of Modern South Asia in the Honors College. We have been going through the political and cultural history of South Asia between 1500 and the present and really asking the question: how did the modern nation states of the region come about? We all know about the British colonialism that shaped the history of the Indian subcontinent but who were the indigenous players involved in the shaping of regions within the subcontinent? What were the religious, linguistic, and sub-cultural complexities that went into the formation of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other South Asian countries? I am incorporating some Digital Humanities training through a digital history project. It’s been a really interesting class for me to teach as I get back into teaching full-time.
I am also looking forward to teaching Symbols and Stories in Art in Spring 2025. I am hoping to bring in some of the folk story traditions of Indian weavers as a part of the class alongside the textiles that these weaving communities produced in the 19th century.
What are you the most excited about as a new faculty member?
I am excited to get back to teaching. I have not taught much in the last couple of years and I have missed it. Interacting with students and getting to know the student community at Mason has been one of the highlights of this semester for me. I am also greatly enjoying meeting colleagues and getting to know the department better.
November 25, 2024