Madhuri Desai awarded prestigious Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA)

Madhuri Desai has been awarded a prestigious Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) for academic year 2020-21. This is a residential fellowship at CASVA, which is part of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. During the fellowship, Professor Desai will be working on her next book, tentatively titled Creating the Mughal Temple. Cassie Mansfield, head of the Department of Art History notes, “An Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowship is a highly coveted award. This fellowship is given to scholars who have distinguished themselves in the fields of art or architectural history, and it is awarded by a jury of one’s peers. So it really is a mark of recognition by the scholarly community. Professor Desai has already made a significant contribution to the study of South Asian architectural history with her award-winning book, Banaras Reconstructed: Architecture and Sacred Space in a Hindu Holy City (2017), and the book she is now writing promises to have just as great an impact on the field. This fellowship will enable her to make significant progress on her new book.”