Partha Mitter

Prof. Partha Mitter, Hon. D.Lit. (Courtauld Institute, London University), is a writer and historian of art and culture, specializing in the reception of Indian art in the West, as well as in modernity, art and identity in India, and more recently in global modernism. He began his career as Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge (1968-69), moving to Clare Hall as Research Fellow by Open Competition (1970-1974). In 1974 he joined Sussex as a Lecturer in Indian History, retiring in 2002 as Professor in Art History. His publications include Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1977; Chicago University Press Paperback, 1992; Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2013); Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge University Press, 1994); Indian Art, Oxford Art History Series (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002); The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde – 1922-1947 (Reaktion Books, London, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007).

Prof. Mitter was Fellow of Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1981-82); Member, Getty Research Institute (2000-2001); Fellow, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass (2003-2004); Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2005-2006); Radhakrishnan Lecturer at All Souls College, Oxford (1992); and Getty Visiting Professor at Bogazici University, Istanbul (2011). In 2000 he was invited by the Indian Government to set up the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. In 1982 he curated and wrote an introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition on the history of Indian photography for the Photographers Gallery, London. At present he is Emeritus Professor in Art History, University of Sussex; Adjunct Research Professor, Carleton University, Canada; Member of Wolfson College, Oxford; and Honorary Fellow, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.