As a member from grad school days (now more than a decade ago!), I have been grateful to ACSAA for playing a central role in creating a space for the study of South and Southeast Asian art while cementing deep networks of friendships. In this time of intense precarity—a worldwide pandemic, massive eco-catastrophes, the loss of livelihood under disaster capitalism, encroachments on minority rights under authoritarian regimes—I think now of ACSAA’s potential role in strengthening an intersectional politics of diversity, mentorship, and camaraderie across North America, South and Southeast Asia, and Europe. It is inevitable that our eco-catastrophic present will transform our discipline, not least because the mobility and access to sites, archives, and museum collections that we have taken for given thus far is bound to change. If given the opportunity, along with my colleagues on the ACSAA board, I hope to work towards finding constructive ways for our intellectual family to navigate this void while attending to the professional needs of current and future members, particularly graduate students and emerging scholars.
Likewise, I look forward to devising strategies that addresses ACSAA’s role in shaping scholarly and public discourse around the equally pressing question of diversity and inclusiveness. I am passionately committed to equity and, to this end, my intellectual practice has consistently moved between academic and public contexts: I have organized conferences in New Delhi, Florence, and elsewhere; conducted workshops for K-12 teachers in California and cultural workers in Malaysia; written on art and ecology in popular forums in India, Germany, and Palestine; participated in campus-level initiatives to introduce climate change in the curriculum; and cofounded a South Asia Art Initiative at UC Berkeley to support graduate students from South Asia and foster public programming on art. I am keen on bringing my commitments, advocacy, and administrate skills to the ACSAA board and look forward to building the blocks for a most just future for all, both within the academy and in our wider community.
BIO
Sugata Ray is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department and the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019), Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art (forthcoming; coedited with Gerhard Wolf and Hannah Baader), and Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (2020; coedited with Venugopal Maddipati). Ray’s current book project, Indian Ocean Art Histories in the Age of Anthropocene Extinction, focuses on the intersecting histories of the post-1500s global trade in natural resources and the extinction of Indian Ocean species. In the past, Ray has published essays on collecting, archiving, and methodologies for a global art history in journals such as Art History and The Art Bulletin and guest edited a special issue of Ars Orientalis (2018) on translations and terminologies. His 2016 essay on the collecting of Islamic art was awarded the Historians of Islamic Art Association’s Margaret Ševčenko Prize.