CONTRIBUTORS - Specialized Research AI at MIT

CONTRIBUTORS

Bani Abidi is a Pakistani visual artist living
between Berlin and Karachi. Encompassing
video, photography, and performance, Abidi’s
practice draws on everyday as well as historical
events to explore issues of nationalism and
state power. She has had solo shows at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and
Gropius Bau, Berlin, among others, and group
shows at the 8th Berlin Biennial, the
Guggenheim Museum, New York, and docu-
menta 13, Kassel.

Alexander Alberro teaches modern and con-
temporary art history at Barnard College and
Columbia University. He is the author of
Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity
(2003) and Abstraction in Reverse: The
Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century
Latin American Art (2017).

jennifer Bajorek teaches literature, art, and
visual culture at Hampshire College. She is the
author of Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial
Imagination in West Africa (2020). Her current
research is on visual and discursive represen-
tations of im/migration in contemporary
France. Since 2013, she has been a research
associate at the University of Johannesburg,
and she is a visiting researcher in the
Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique, through
the Fondation Maison des Sciences de
l’Homme, at EHESS, Paris.

joshua I. Cohen teaches art history at the City
College of New York and the CUNY Graduate
Center. His first book, The “Black Art”
Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism
across Continents (2020), received honorable
mention for the Modernist Studies Association
First Book Prize. His current book project, ten-
tatively titled Art of the Opaque: African
Modernism, Decolonization, and the Cold War, is
a critical study of modernism between Africa
and its diaspora in the international contexts of
decolonization and the global Cold War.

Tammer S. El-Sheikh is a writer, critic, and
professor of art history at York University in
Toronto. His major publications include
Entangled Bodies: Art, Identity and
Intercorporeality (2020), “Draw Me a Sheep!
Contemporary Responses to the Histories of
Art Education, Surrealism and Psychoanalysis
in Egypt” (2017), and “Six Characters and an
Anthropologist: Form and Information in
Three Works by Hassan Khan” (2013). His
reviews, art criticism, and essays have
appeared in Arab Studies Journal, Canadian
Art, Parachute, Border Crossings, and Black
Flash, as well as online at Momus.ca and
Akimbo.ca and in the catalogs of exhibitions
both in Canada and abroad.

vishal Khandelwal is a postdoctoral fellow
in the Department of History of Art and
Architecture at Harvard University. His cur-
rent book manuscript analyzes design and art
pedagogy and practice at the National Institute
of Design in India, through the work of key
individuals who, between 1955 and 1985,
taught visual communication, textile design,
architecture, and product design at this experi-
mental design school and at other academies
in Ahmedabad and beyond. Khandelwal’s
research and writing have been supported by
the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies
in the Fine Arts, the Rockefeller Archive
Center, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His article
“Nelly Sethna and the Reception of Textiles
between the United States and India” (2021)
was published in The Journal of Modern Craft.

Sonal Khullar teaches in the Department of
the History of Art at the University of
Pennsylvania. She is the author of Worldly
Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity,
and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 (2015) and
the editor of Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of
the Book in South Asia (2023).

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Ijlal Muzaffar teaches in the Department of
Theory and History of Art and Design at the
Rhode Island School of Design. He has written
extensively on the intersection of modern archi-
tecture and Third World development dis-
courses. His current research looks at how
modern architectural framings of local materi-
als, self-help, and climatically responsive build-
ings helped bypass the central dilemma of
mid-20th century decolonial world order: how to
make plausible the idea of spontaneous Third
World development without accounting for cen-
turies of capital drain under colonial rule.

Foad Torshizi teaches in the Department of
Theory and History of Art and Design at the
Rhode Island School of Design. His areas of
research are global contemporary art, contem-
porary Iranian and Middle Eastern art, postco-
lonial theory, the ethics of readership, and the

politics of translation and interpretation. His
writing has appeared in books and academic
journals in both the United States and Iran,
including Grey Room; Comparative Studies of
South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Iranian
Studies; and Herfeh: Honarmand.

vazira Zamindar teaches in the Department
of History at Brown University. She is the
author of The Long Partition and the Making of
Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries,
Histories (2007) and a coeditor of Love, War
and Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in
Pakistan (2020) and How Secular Is Art? On
the Politics of Art, History and Religion in South
Asia (2023). She founded the discussion
forum Art History from the South (2018–20)
and collaborates with the Decolonial Initiative
on Migration of Objects and People at Brown
University.