Ankush Arora

Ankush Arora is interested in early modern South Asia, primarily the development of Mughal manuscripts as a result of the royal court’s artistic and political interfaces with Europe, Iran, China as well as its interactions with painterly traditions unique to India. In particular, Ankush is interested in the evolution of the genre of natural history painting by artists of the Mughal atelier. Potential areas of research include: formal qualities of animal and plant portraiture; behavioral and physiological characteristics of the nonhuman species; and narratives of human-nonhuman encounters and relations, as documented in the Mughal-era chronicles and biographies. 

Ankush has a master’s degree in art history from Syracuse University (2021-23), where his thesis examined the vegetal aspects of the Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander’s Mughal painting-inspired drawings and sculptures. Other projects comprised researching the cow’s visualization in Indian calendar art posters at the university’s Special Collections Research Center; and curating an exhibition of Mithila paintings from the collections of the Syracuse University Art Museum. Ankush is a recipient of the Digital India Learning Fellowship (2022), awarded by the American Institute of Indian Studies. The project involved curating a digital exhibition from the institute’s collection of documented paintings of plants, animals, and birds from the seventeenth-century Mughal emperor Jahangir’s period.

Prior to moving to the United States, Ankush worked as an arts journalist and gallery manager in India, where he was born. He has a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Hindu College, University of Delhi (2004-07); and a postgraduate diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi (2007-08).