Crafting Cuisine: A Celebration of Food and Art in South Asia

Join us for Crafting Cuisine: A Celebration of Food and Art in South Asia with subject matter experts Andrea Gutierrez, Sarah K. Khan, Deepa S. Reddy, Sylvia Houghteling and Yael Rice. “Nala as a Mirror to Buttermilks: Accessing Place and Time” with Deepa Reddy and Andrea Gutierrez “Ephemeral Tie-and-Dye” with Sylvia Houghteling Engage with your sense of smell while creating a foldable book that highlights the ovens depicted in an illustrated recipe book from early sixteenth-century central India. Art historian Yael Rice and artist Sarah Khan will guide you through the process and reveal invisible histories and narratives untold that include the migration of people, plants and ideas. Andrea Gutierrez teaches at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Asian Studies. Andrea uses Sanskrit, Prakrits, and Tamil languages to conduct research on projects concerning food history of South Asia and animal studies for the region. Andrea has recently published on medieval temple food in the Journal of Hindu Studies (“Toward a Better Understanding of Medieval Food Practices: The View from Srirangam” https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hiad016) and on medieval captive elephant training (“Elephant Education, Linguistic Articulation, or Punishment? Gajasiksha as Interspecies Communication in Elephant Manuals of Early India” https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/conversations-with-the-animate-other-9789356403055/). Gutiérrez is presently preparing a book manuscript tentatively called Royal Pleasures: Recipes & Dining in India’s History. Sylvia Houghteling is an Associate Professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr. She specializes in early modern visual and material culture with a focus on the history of textiles, South Asian art and architecture, and the material legacies and ruptures of European colonialism. Houghteling’s first book, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022), a recipient of a College Art Association Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant, examined the textiles crafted and collected across the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing how woven objects helped to shape the social, political, religious, and aesthetic life of early modern South Asia. Her ongoing research is concerned with questions of temporality and the unique material histories of the Indian Ocean trade. Sarah K Khan (b. Mangla, Pakistan) utilizes food to provoke thought about injustice towards people and the planet. She explores food, culture, women, migration, and identity in urban and rural environments. A maker and scholar, she uses photography, films, print-making, maps, ceramics and writing. A two-time Fulbright recipient, Khan earned a BA in Middle Eastern history and Arabic (Smith College), two Masters (public health and nutrition, Columbia University) and a Ph.D. (traditional ecological knowledge systems, plant sciences, New York Botanical Garden-CUNY). She has received numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies to pursue her work. Most recent residencies include Anderson Ranch Residency (2024), Women Studio Workshop (2023), Kohler Arts/Industry Residency (2022), Princeton Artist-in-Residence ArtHx (2021-22), Ellis Beauregard (2021), Monson Arts (2021), Project for Empty Space Feminist Residency (2020), Indigo Arts Alliance (2019), and as the Boren Chertkov Residency for Labor and Justice at Blue Mountain Center (2019). Deepa S Reddy is a cultural anthropologist with the University of Houston-Clear Lake: tenured faculty and then part-time working from India since 2000. Her book, Religious Identity and Political Destiny, was published with Rowman and Littlefield in 2006; she was part of an editorial collective that curated a volume on public expressions of hinduness, Public Hinduisms (Sage, 2010), which is currently being revised for re-publication. From 2004-8 she was co-investigator on an NIH-funded project to understand “Indian and Hindu perspectives on Genetic Variation Research”; between 2017-18, she was lead researcher (Chennai) for “The Asthma Files”: a global, multi-city study of air quality and environmental governance in cities around the world, including six in India. She has also published on the Indian women’s movement, caste politics, and religious nationalism, as well as on Indian and Hindu perspectives on human genetic variation, bio-politics, and constructions of the civic. Yael Rice is associate professor of art history and of Asian languages and civilizations at Amherst College. She specializes in the art and architecture of South Asia, Central Asia, and Iran, with a particular focus on manuscripts and other portable arts of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. She is the author of the recently published The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court (University of Washington Press, 2023).