Dr Anisha Palat
Heritage Postdoctoral Research Fellow, September - November 2026
Dr Anisha Palat is an art historian whose research explores the intersections of visual culture, animals, caste, colonialism, and the environmental humanities in South Asia. She completed her PhD in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh in 2024 and is currently a Heritage Collections Research Fellow at IASH. Her current research examines colonial-era hunting photography in India, exploring how photographic images mediated relationships between empire, animals, and the environment. This research is also supported by the Charles Wallace India Trust (2026) and the British Art Network (2025).
Anisha’s first monograph, Aesthetic Ecologies: The Cow, Caste and Contemporary Art in India, is forthcoming in 2027 with Manchester University Press. Previously, Anisha was a Research Fellow at the Tamil Nadu Council of Historical Research. In January 2027, she will join Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, as a Research Fellow.
Project Title: Colonial Legacies & Ecological Erasure in Hunting Photography, India, c.1800-1950
In colonial India, hunting was a display of pride and imperial authority, captured in photographs that staged hunters in triumphant poses over dead animals. This project offers a new perspective: it treats these photographs as archives of ecological erasure rather than celebratory images, shifting attention from the glorification of the hunt to look instead at animal death. In doing so, the project advances a fundamental rethinking of the cultural and ecological history of animals. It reorients colonialism in visual culture by showing how critical reinterpretation unsettles imperial narratives of conquest and recasts these images as evidence of ecological violence.