Tamara Sears

Tamara Sears (PhD, University of Pennsylvania; BA, Wesleyan University, CT) is Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University.  She is a specialist on the art and architectural history of South Asia with particular interests in the relationships between political power, religion, and the production of sacred architecture in ancient and medieval India. Her research focuses on the relationship between ritual and architecture, asceticism and worldly power, and iconology and religious experience. In addition, she has written on the continuity and reuse of Hindu temple and monastery sites during the Islamic period, and she has explored secondary interests in the role that archaeology and the writing of art history have played in the construction of knowledge in the colonial and postcolonial worlds.

Professor Sears’s first book, Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: Architecture and Asceticism in Early Medieval India (Yale University Press, 2014) received the PROSE award in the category of Architecture and Urban Planning, granted by the Association of American Publishers for professional and scholarly excellence.  Her second book, currently in progress, combines approaches to architecture, landscape, and environmental history in order to map mobility, cultural authority, and the transmission of visual knowledge in precolonial India.