Molly Aitken

Molly Emma Aitken writes about image ontologies, hermeneutics, materiality, and relationships among painting, music, dance, dress, sociability and self-fashioning within the ambit of South Asia’s royal courts. Her book The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) broke new ground with its commitment to the meaningful interplay of court painting styles. The book won CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey award in 2011 and the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2012. Aitken is currently working on two manuscripts. One, We Are All Women, is about artful expressions of loving and gendering in elite Mughal society.  A personal exploration, the second, In the Sisterhood of Images, turns on the pressure a life exerts on scholarship. Aitken is Associate Professor of early modern to modern South Asian visual arts at The Graduate Center and The City College of New York (CUNY).