PhD Stony Brook University (SUNY) MA National Museum, New Delhi BA Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University
Niharika Dinkar worked as a photojournalist in New Delhi before turning to art history. She is interested in the intersections between art, technology and the environment in nineteenth century South Asia. At Boise State, she teaches classes in Asian art history and visual culture, film and media histories, gender, sexuality and performance studies, and more recent interests in environmental humanities.
Her first book, Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India (University of Manchester Press, 2019), explored how light was central to the visual politics and imaginative geographies of empire. Rather than viewing light an allegorical, abstract entity, it asserts the presence of a vast infrastructure of lighting technologies in the 19th century to propose we study the material cultures fostered by light in modernity, as light was instrumentalized by industries of representation like photography and film.
These considerations of the material infrastructures undergirding representation have guided her current interest in environmental humanities. She is currently working on a second book project, which is an archaeology of moving image practices involving the animal in colonial visual culture, tentatively titled The Animated Image: Beastly Tales from India. The book examines the constitutive role of animals in representation, to acknowledge how they served as subjects for moving image technologies.
Aesthetic Practices and Spatial Descriptions: Historical and Transregional Perspectives Ed., Hannah Baader, Martina Becker and Niharika Dinkar. (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, and Columbia University Press, In Press)
Edited Journal Issues:
Marg“Framing Women: Gender in the Colonial Archive, Marg Vol. 62, No. 24, 2011
“Seeing in the Dark: Colonial Calcutta’s Poetics of the Night”, Special Issue on Light and Darkness in the British Empire, Ed. Manila Castoro, Visual Culture in Britain, Forthcoming, July 2027
“Cave of Dreams: Elephanta in Thomas Rowlandson’s Grand Master, or Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan in Doron Galili and Erkki Huhtamo ed., Routledge Companion to Media Archaeology, Routledge, Forthcoming 2026.
“Shooting Elephants and the Performance of Imperial Power” in Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein ed., Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories 1750-1900, Leuven University Press, 2025, pp. 67-87.
“Playgrounds of Empire: Art and Homosexuality in South and South East Asia” Catalogue contribution for the exhibition, First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity 1869-1930 Ed., Jonathan Katz and Johnny Willis. Phaidon, 2025, pp. 279-87 and 382-4.
“Pyrotechnics and Photography: Saltpeter and the Colonial History of Photographic Lighting”, Photographies, Vol.13, No. 3, 2021. Special Issue on Light Sensitive Material Ed. Michelle Henning and Theresa Mikuriya, pp. 395-420.
Introduction:Tirchhi Nazar: The Gaze Beyond Darshan in South Asia” South Asian Studies Vol. 37, No. 2, 2021, pp. 77-88.
“Seeing the Elephant: Animal Spectatorship and the Imperial Gaze in Colonial India” South Asian Studies Vol. 37, No. 2, 2021, pp. 117-136.
“Mythologies of the Artist: Cinema, Melodrama and Ravi Varma” in Sandra Kleister and Rachel Elsner ed., The Mediatization of the Artist, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 215-232.
“The New Conquering Empire of Light and Reason: The Civilizing Mission of William Jones” in Ronit Milano ed., Light in a Socio-cultural Perspective, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018, pp. 33-48.
“Remembering John Berger: On art and property”, The Social Scientist, Vol. 45, No. 1/2, 2017, 93-96.
“Private Lives and Interior Spaces in Raja Ravi Varma’s Scholar Paintings” Art History, Vol. 37 (3): 510-535
“Masculine Regeneration and the Attenuated Body in Swadeshi Art: Reconsidering the Early Works of Nandalal Bose” in Oxford Art Journal. June 2010, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp.167-188.
