2026 Getty Graduate Symposium

Friday, February 6, 2026, 9:45am-6pm
Museum Lecture Hall and Online
The Getty Research Institute hosts the 8th annual Getty Graduate Symposium, which showcases the work of emerging scholars from art history graduate programs across California. Organized into three sessions, the symposium includes nine individual presentations, moderated panel discussions, and Q&A sessions with the audience.
Participants include our own PhD candidate, Lily Allen
This event is FREE free but advance tickets are required.
To watch online, register via Zoom
Participants:
Anahit Galstyan, University of California, Santa Barbara
Andrea Jung-An Liu, University of California, Berkeley
Bermet Nishanova, University of California, Irvine
Dejan Vasić, Stanford University
Evelyn Char, University of California, Santa Cruz
Johnnie Chatman, University of California, San Diego
Lily Allen, University of California, Riverside
Margot Yale, University of Southern California
Thomas Duncan, University of California, Los Angeles
Conrad Rudolph, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Medieval Art History
The Huntington Comes to UCR!

The verdant Kashmir Valley, a place of unearthly beauty, has long been a subject of praise and description. The history and geography of Kashmir appeared in multiple literary genres, including Sanskrit sources which claimed the valley to be a sacred landscape and Persian courtly literature which characterised Kashmir as being jannat nazir (paradise like). Recent scholarship has highlighted the connections between Mughal literary imaginings, political discourse, and the construction of gardens in Kashmir, interpreting these landscaped spaces as a means to claim sovereignty over the land. In the nineteenth century, the region was again the subject of an imperial discourse, that of the British empire, a discourse shaped by a particular interest in the production of Kashmiri shawls, a highly sought after commodity in Victorian England. Among the shawls were a small set of embroidered ‘map’ shawls which depicted the city of Srinagar and its significant landmarks, both natural and manmade, one of which was sent as a gift to Queen Victoria. Large-scale painted cotton maps of the entire valley were also produced in the mid-nineteenth century, often employing the same visual conventions as the shawls. This paper explores the image-making practices which underlay the production of these textiles, departing from existing scholarship which has emphasized their imbrication within the colonial enterprise. I instead approach their resistance of the colonial gaze and highlight how the craftsmen creating them were informed by a distinctly South Asian, perhaps even Kashmiri, sense of place.