Deepthi Murali
I could not help myself. I had to poke the wooden rearing horse in his mouth. His teeth were much sharper than I anticipated. --At Fort Kochi's "Jew" Town with a decidedly spirited horse (Kerala, India, Winter 2013)
Hello! I don’t know how you got here but welcome! I am currently Research Assistant Professor at Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media at George Mason University. I work on digital art history projects that traces histories of production and use of eighteenth-century cotton textiles from India. My research generally examines decorative arts made of wood, ivory, and cotton in littoral India, mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
My major research project at present is Connecting Threads, a digital humanities (DH) project that traces the history of striped and checked cotton textiles produced in eighteenth-century southeastern India and used by communities of color in the Greater Caribbean Region. This project brings together Indian cotton textiles in multiple museum collections across US and UK and archival documents of trade in these textiles to weave together the history of production of these textiles by lower-caste Indian weavers and the many ways in which these modest textiles helped foster cultural and community identities for free and enslaved people of color in the Caribbean. This project is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. My secondary DH project at present explores the possibilities of using computational analysis methods in the field of art history. This project titled Digital Chintz uses eighteenth-century chintz textiles in North American museum collections and associated museum metadata as a test case for this study.
In my current role, I also manage the HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium project, a digital public history project led by The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Other projects I have worked on at the Center from 2020-2022 as a postdoctoral fellow:
I love podcasts and public history, so of course, I dabble in it personally as well. My friend and I run the Masala History podcast where we talk about different historical topics related to South Asia. We are on an extended sabbatical but we will back in 2024. Do check us out! If you want to talk to me, the best place is Bluesky Social (@deepthimurali.bsky.social).
This website will have bits and pieces of all these things that I am part of, but it was largely set up as a dissertation website. My dissertation titled Transculturality, Sensoriality, and Politics of the Decorative Arts of Kerala, India was submitted in Summer 2020. This website is where I "brain dump" a lot of material. My blog posts in the "Research" folder are works-in-progress in which you'll surely encounter things that you have not seen, and places and people you have not heard of before. If you want to know more about them, drop me a line!