Tamara Sears is a specialist on the art and architectural history of the Indian subcontinent, with particular interests in the relationships between political power, religion, and the production of sacred architecture. She has conducted extensive field research in the north and central Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan at sites dating primarily between the seventh and thirteenth centuries A.D. The results of her studies have been published in The Art Bulletin, South Asian Studies, and various edited collections. In addition, she has written on the reuse of earlier sites during the early Islamic period, and 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. She teaches survey courses on South Asian art and temple architecture, as well as more specialized seminars that explore interrelated topics such as ritual and architecture, asceticism and worldly power, visual narrative and performance, and iconology and religious experience.

Professor Sears is currently completing a book, Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: The Architecture of Asceticism in Early Medieval India, which examines the connections between the emergence of the Hindu monastery as a new architectural type, the regionalization and localization of royal power, and the institutionalization of new forms of ritual practice from the eighth through twelfth centuries. She has begun a new project that looks at architecture, and architectural knowledge, as an archive for mapping mobility, cultural authority, and the spread of religious and courtly cultures around the turn of the first millennium across central India.

Before joining Yale as an assistant professor in 2009, Professor Sears held faculty positions in the departments of Art History at NYU and Florida State University. She has been a recipient of a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the History of Art and Humanities (non-residential), a Scott Opler Emerging Scholar Fellowship from the Society of Architectural Historians, and a Fulbright-Hays DDRA

Selected Publications
Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: The Architecture of Asceticism in Early Medieval India (book manuscript in progress).

“Building Beyond the Temple: Sacred Centers and Living Communities in Medieval Central India,” in A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture, edited by Rebecca Brown and Deborah Hutton, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 123-152.

“Fortified Mathas and Fortress Mosques: The Reuse of Hindu Monastic Sites in the Sultanate Period,” Archives of Asian Art 59 (2009): 7-31.

“Constructing the Guru: Ritual Authority and Architectural Space in Medieval India,” The Art Bulletin 40, no. 1 (March 2008): 7-31.

“Śaiva Monastic Complexes in Twelfth-Century Rajasthan: The Pāśupatas and Cāhamānas at Menāl,” South Asian Studies 23 (2007): 107-126.

“‘Whither Vernacular?’: Discussions from the Seminar,” in Traditional and Vernacular Architecture, edited by Subashree Krishnaswami and coordinated by Michael W. Meister (Madras: Madras Craft Foundation, 2003), 133-140.