Chandreyi Basu
I studied History and Art History in India and Italy before earning a Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, the year I started teaching at St. Lawrence. Over nearly 25 years at St. Lawrence, I have added new Asian art courses to the Art & Art History and Asian Studies curriculum, updated an existing Art History survey course, and mentored student research projects on Latin American art, African art, and Asian art both on and off campus. I have also remained active as a scholar of early Indian art and have served as department Chair, program coordinator, and Secretary of Faculty Council.
I offer thematically oriented courses on Buddhist Art, Gender Issues, and the Taj Mahal as well as broader surveys of South Asian art and pre-modern art. My goal in all these courses is to help students to develop their capacity for comparing art cross-culturally. My students have had the opportunity to learn experientially through fieldwork in Asia. In 2003, I traveled to Thailand with students from my Buddhist Art and Ritual class with a grant from the St. Lawrence University Asian Studies Initiative. In March 2019, my SYE students Elsa Coughlin '19 and Ella Neilsen '19 and I conducted a field study of architectural preservation and sustainable architecture in Mumbai, India. During the pandemic, I developed and taught two new special topics courses, one on Indian Painting and another on Animal-Human Interactions in Buddhist Art. Both courses intersect with my emerging scholarly interests in these areas.
My scholarship focuses primarily on the art of northwest India and Pakistan in the early historic period, specifically on issues of patronage, iconography, and sculptural workshops in the Mathura region in northern India. My first publication, Displaying Many Faces: Art and Gandharan Identity (2004), catalogued a private U.S. collection of early Buddhist sculpture and was completed during my initial years at St. Lawrence. Recent essays on the urban underpinnings of Gandharan narrative art and the interactions between non-human and human animals in ancient Bharhut have appeared in edited volumes published by Routledge. I have also presented and published papers on body markings in India, worshipper figures in Buddhist art, the earliest surviving sculpture of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, and the famous Indian ivory figurine found in Pompeii, Italy. I was invited to write the bibliographic essay on Hindu iconography for Oxford Bibliographies Online (OUP) and continue to update the text periodically.
In 2023, I curated the exhibit, “Environment, Health, and the Body in Traditional Paintings from Contemporary India,” for the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence. The exhibit featured nearly fifty paintings by thirty five individual Indian artists working outside mainstream contemporary art. Many of these paintings are now part of the gallery’s permanent collection and are available for study to our students across campus as well as to scholars at other institutions.
Education
Ph.D. Pennsylvania; Laurea Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples, Italy; M.A. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India; B.A. Calcutta, India.
Recent publications
“Nonhuman Animals on Unlabelled Sculptures of the Bharhut Stupa Railing,” in Chakśudāna (Opening the Eyes): Seeing South Asian Art Anew, Pika Ghosh and Pushkar Sohni eds., Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2024.
Review of Listening to Icons. Vol. I, Indian Iconographic & Iconological Studies, by Doris Meth Srinivasan. Berliner Indologische Studien 26 (2023): 219-226.
"Elusive borders: The city in Gandhāran narrative art," in Exploring South Asian Urbanity, Urvi Mukhopadhyay and Suchandra Ghosh eds., pp. 127-151. London & New York: Routledge, 2022.
Classes taught
Survey of Art I (AAH 116); Taj Mahal: Yesterday, Today (AAH 212); Buddhist Art and Ritual (AAH 217); Arts of South Asia (AAH 218); Gender Issues in Asian Art (AAH 319).