Department of History of Art & Visual Studies Pulse of Art History Lecture Series.

Join us for a talk by Zirwat Chowdhury, (Assistant Professor, UCLA).

This Pulse Lecture will take place in Goldwin Smith Hall G22.

Abstract
This talk situates the compositional form of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of The Hancock Household (1765-67) within a colonial economy in 18th-century Bengal, constituted by the warped and overlapping circulation of goods and, often enslaved, women. Circumventing the contemporary art historical drive to identify marginalized figures in British (and more widely, European) portraits, this paper traces instead the portrait’s figuration of South Asian and Eurasian women’s intractable value amid the risks of colonial circulation.   

Biography
Zirwat Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of 18th- and 19th- Century European Art at UCLA. Her research concerns the interconnected histories of art, visual culture, and material culture in Britain, France, South Asia, and the Atlantic World in the 18th and 19th Centuries. She received her PhD in Art History from Northwestern University.