Dr Mallica Kumbera Landrus
Dr Mallica Kumbera Landrus
Keeper of Eastern Art and Curator of Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian Art, Ashmolean Museum
Associate Professor for the History of Art in India
Fellow by Special Election
Research Summary
Dr Mallica Kumbera Landrus is Keeper of the Eastern Art Department at the Ashmolean Museum where the collections include ceramics, textiles, sculpture, metalwork, paintings, prints and other decorative arts that span more than 5,000 years of cultural and artistic development in Asia. Her curatorial responsibilities are mainly in the area of Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian art. As Associate Professor for the History of Art in India her remit at Oxford includes teaching and research in Indian material and visual culture.
Dr Kumbera Landrus specialises in the history of art and architecture in India, particularly with regard to the intersection of art, architecture, religion, politics and socio-economics. She is especially interested in issues of cultural translation, focusing on works and built environments created for and by colonial powers, and by emerging cultures that were themselves hybrid, transnational and diasporic.
CV
Dr Kumbera Landrus was Andrew W. Mellon Teaching Curator for the Ashmolean Museum’s University Engagement Programme (UEP) between 2012 and 2017. Before Oxford, she was a senior lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) while simultaneously holding teaching, research, curatorial and/or management posts at institutes such as Princeton University, Brown University and the Jaipur City Palace Museum. She was the first Director of Princeton’s Global Seminar Programme in India. In the late 1990s, she was a member of the Torre de Palma excavation in Portugal, one of the largest Roman villas in Iberia.
Teaching
- Trade and Exchange in Modern South Asia: Transcultural Objects, Ideas and Identities (MPhil and MSc in South Asian Studies, SIAS)
- Encountering South Asian Sculpture (BA History of Art)
- Supervision on topics in South Asian material and visual culture across the Social Sciences and Humanities
Featured publications
2015 Parish Churches, Colonisation and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Portuguese Goa, in Parish Churches in the Early Modern World, ed. Andrew Spicer, Ashgate
2015 Yoshida Hiroshi: A Japanese artist in India, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 19 June–13 September, (Kolkata). Edited by C Pollard and M Kumbera Landrus
2015 Bengal and Modernity: Early 20th century art in India, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2 March–1 June (Kolkata). Contributors: S Bhandare, M Kumbera Landrus, A Lahiri, P Mitter and P Pal
2014 Trans-cultural Temples: Identity and Practice in Goa, in In the Shadow of the Golden Age, ed. Julia Hegewald, EB Verlag, Berlin
2014 Sculptures from Kerala: Form and Performance, in Marg Publications, Mumbai
2011 Women Representing Women in Tradition, Trauma, Transformation: Representations of Women, Brown University
2010 Early Masterpieces, 1950s–70s in MF Husain, Brown University
2009 Goa: the Rome of the Orient in Baroque, 1620–1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence, eds. Nigel Llewellyn and Michael Snodin. London: V & A Publishing
2008 Catalogue entries on the Indian objects [Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic and Colonial] in Selected Works, Catalogue of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, pp. 48–52.
2006 Portuguese Goa – Taking Ownership with Architecture, in Vanamala, ed. Klaus Bruhn and Gerd Mevissen, Wiedler Buchverlag, Berlin, pp. 97–107.
2003 Vijayanagara Art: A Political and Historical Metaphor, in Sagar 10 (University of Texas at Austin) 78–101.
