Rebecca joined the department in 2006 after teaching at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and the University of Redlands. Her work has been supported by a prestigious Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, and her research on South Asia has been funded through various grants from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the US Social Science Research Council, and the British Academy.
Research Rebecca’s research has centred on the cultural politics of colonial and post-Independence South Asia. Her work on colonialism, urban space, and the representation of India in visual culture has been published in The Journal of Asian Studies, Archives of Asian Art, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, The Journal of Urban History, and The Journal of Bengal Art. Her book on modernity and India’s relation to Euro-America is forthcoming from Duke University Press and is titled Art for a Modern India, 1947-80. She has published several articles on this material in venues such as Art Journal, South Asian Studies, and Screen. She is also co-editor, with Deborah Hutton, of Asian Art (Blackwell 2006), the first anthology of primary and secondary material on this topic. She and Hutton are currently editing the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Asian Art.
Her current research interrogates the imagery of the spinning wheel as used to forward the agenda of nationalism in late colonial India, and she is developing this work into a larger project on visual cultural politics and nation-building within the subcontinent. She is also working with questions related to the South Asian diaspora, investigating the articulation of British and US South Asian identity through a postcolonial lens. Her work is interdisciplinary, drawing on history, media studies, geography, gender studies, anthropology, as well as politics.
Teaching Rebecca teaches in the areas of colonialism, nationalism, and postcoloniality, particularly as they are articulated through visual culture, urban space, and architecture. She has taught extensively on the visual culture of South and East Asia, as well as the Islamic world. She convenes the year 2 modules in The Politics of the Middle East and South Asia and Cinema, History and Politics, and lectures in the year 1 modules Watching Them Watching Us and Understanding Global Politics. At the MA level she teaches on the contemporary legacies of colonialism, the production of Euro-American modernity as an outgrowth of colonial power relations, and the role of the visual in politics. She welcomes inquiries from research students interested in South Asia, cultural politics, visual culture and politics, colonialism, and postcolonial studies.
