Dr Yuthika Sharma is a historian of South Asian art. She works on the art and intellectual history of South Asia in the early modern period. Her recent work has looked at artistic agency and the transmission of visual knowledge in the long eighteenth century in the backdrop of shifting patterns of cultural patronage of imperial and royal courts, the nouveau riche and European administrators, arguing for new methodologies of approaching the visual culture of this period. She is currently preparing a monograph on cross–regional politics, artist guilds and the formation of visual identity in the later Mughal period. Yuthika welcomes PhD students interested in late medieval, early modern and modern South Asian art.
Yuthika received her PhD from Columbia University, New York, with specialisms in Indian painting and early Buddhist art and architecture (minor specialism). At present she offers advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses on early modern South Asia and critical and thematic approaches to the study of South Asian art and painting as well as survey courses on early and later Indian art.
Before joining HoA, Yuthika worked in the Asia Department of the British Museum (2014-15). She was also AHRC Cultural Engagement fellow in the Department of History at UCL as part of the Leverhulme funded project, The East India Company at Home (2013).
Curatorial work
Yuthika's previous curatorial work includes the co-curated exhibition and book Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857 at the Asia Society, New York (2012) and curatorial support for the exhibition and book Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj (2008). More recently, she curated an exhibition at the University of Edinburgh Main Library, Highlands to Hindustan (2017), in which over 50 objects spanning two millennia of the art and culture of the Indian subcontinent were put on display.
