Sonal Khullar

Biography

Sonal Khullar is W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She previously taught at the University of Washington. She specialises in the art of South Asia from the eighteenth century onward, with particular interest in histories of cosmopolitanism, postcolonial art worlds and critical historiographies of art. Drawing on scholarship in anthropology, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, Khullar’s research and teaching interrogate the global turn in art history.

Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 (University of California Press, 2015), her debut book, received the Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize of the Association of Asian Studies (2017) and the Millard Meiss Publication Award and Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award of the College Art Association (2014). Khullar was the editor of Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia (University of Washington Press, 2023).

Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from institutions such as Wolf Humanities Center, University of Pennsylvania (2020 –2021); American Institute of Indian Studies, Chicago (2015–2016); Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London (2014–2015); Japan Foundation, Los Angeles and Tokyo (2014–2015); American Council of Learned Societies, New York (2013–2014, 2011–2012); College Art Association, New York (2013–2014); and Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington (2011–2012), among others.

Khullar earned a PhD in the History of Art with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley (2009).

Born in 1978 in New Delhi, she currently lives and works in Philadelphia.

SAF participation:
March Meeting 2023