Sujatha Arundathi Meegama

Biography

Sujatha Arundathi Meegama joined the School of Art, Design, and Media as an Assistant Professor in Art History in July 2012. She received her M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in History of Art from University of California, Berkeley. Her research questions the ethno-religious construction of the Sri Lankan art historical canon and argues for an alternative narrative, one in which religious, cultural, and visual boundaries are negotiated by diverse patrons and artisan workshops. Her book under the working title of Connected Temples: Patrons, Artisans, and Deities of Buddhist and Hindu Temples in Sri Lanka examines two types of temples—kôvils and devâles—dedicated to deities associated with the two main ethnic groups in Sri Lanka: Tamil Hindus and Sinhalese Buddhists, respectively. Questioning the oppositional binaries of South Indian and Sri Lankan, Hindu and Buddhist, Dravidian and Sinhalese, and invader and native that have heretofore framed the scholarship on Sri Lankan art, this book draws on the deeply connected art-historical approaches of patronage and appropriation, which focus on specific people and their actions, arguing for a more nuanced understanding of these religious monuments. Before she joined NTU, she was a Woman’s Board Fellow in Museum Education at The Art Institute of Chicago (1998-2000), and she was a James R. Gray Lecturer at the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley (2011-2012).

Research Interest

Patronage, Artisans, Influence, Appropriation, Connected Histories, Material Culture, East Meets West, Ethnography.