UCLA art historian Zirwat Chowdhury will discuss Joshua Reynold's mid-19th century portrait of the Hancock household with a focus on its racialized configuration of colonial patrimony.
Monday, October 26, 2026
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383
October 26, 2026, 12:00 p.m.–1:30 p.m.
This lecture by Zirwat Chowdhury, assistant professor of 18th- and 19th-century European art at UCLA, will trace the racialized configuration of colonial patrimony within the compositional form of Joshua Reynolds's mid-18th-century portrait of the Hancock household.
Chowdhury's first book, "Enlightened Relations: Imperial Power and Artistic Form in 18th-Century Britain" is forthcoming in spring 2027 from Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. The book examines how British painting — by artists who never traveled beyond Britain or the Mediterranean world — was transformed by the social relations of empire. It deploys the lens of the “Indies” to foreground the indeterminate and unstable processes of conquest that connected Britain, South Asia and the Atlantic world within an entangled imperial geography.
Tracing how new conceptions of artistic form in aesthetic philosophy and art theory translated philosopher John Locke’s theorization of space as the formal relations between the figures that occupy it, the book demonstrates how painterly compositions became important sites for discerning social relations at a global scale.
Chowdhury's research has been supported by the Hellman Society of Fellows at UCLA, Getty Research Institute (NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship), William Andrews Clark Memorial Library/Center for 17th– and 18th-Century Studies at UCLA (Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship), Institute of Historical Research (Mellon Dissertation Fellowship), Huntington Library (Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship), Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art. She is also an alumna of the Attingham Summer School (’13) and Royal Collection Studies (’18).
Prior to joining the UCLA faculty, she taught at Reed College and Bennington College. She also served as the community development director for the town of Bennington, Vermont.