Cogut Institute for the Humanities
Center for the Study of the Early Modern World
Holly Shaffer
Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture
Research Interests
18th- and 19th-Century Art and Architecture in South Asia and Britain, Pune (India) in the 18th Century, Print in the 19th Century, Ephemeral Arts in the Northern India Region of Awadh, 19th-Century European Representations of India
Biography
Holly Shaffer specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth century art and architecture in South Asia and Britain. She earned her doctorate in the History of Art from Yale University in 2015, and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Dartmouth College from 2015 to 2017. Her current book project interprets the eclectic arts produced in the western Indian city of Pune in the eighteenth century and their dissemination in print in the nineteenth century. Other projects include studies of ephemeral arts, such as light, cuisine, architectural models, and scent in the northern Indian region of Awadh; and of 19th-century European representations of India that went viral.