Dr Mallica Kumbera Landrus

Dr Mallica Kumera Landrus is interested in how material and visual culture can contribute to our understanding of global history. Her research interests focus on India, particularly with regard to the intersection of art, architecture, religion, politics and socio-economics. Kumera Landrus is especially interested in issues of cultural translation, focusing on works and built environments created for and by colonial powers, and by emerging cultures that were themselves hybrid, transnational and diasporic.
 
Focussing on archives at the Australian National University (ANU) and in the Ashmolean, with Professor Chaitanya Sambrani (ANU) and other international colleagues, Kumera Landrus is collaborating on a project with a view to generating insights into the work of particular art historians as part of historiographic enquiries into the nature of Indian classicism, the research  construction and validation in colonial nationalist and post-independence periods. ANU holds the archives of Arthur Basham, who played an important role in writing the history of Hindu-Buddhist classical culture in India. The archives of his contemporaries i.e. William Cohn, Douglas Barrett, James Harle are held in the Ashmolean’s Eastern Art Department. Kumera Landrus is currently involved in initiating the digitisation of parts of the Eastern Art archives.

Teaching
•    Trade and Exchange in Modern South Asia: Transcultural Objects, Ideas and Identities (MPhil and MSc in South Asian Studies, SIAS)
•    Encountering South Asian Sculpture (BA History of Art)
•    Supervision on topics in South Asian material and visual culture across the Social Sciences and Humanities