Alabama Professor Helping Save Sacred Architecture In Nagpur, India

By Shannon Thomason

An American art history professor could help India preserve some historic religious sculptures and architecture.

Cathleen Cummings, Ph.D., associate professor of art history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, just returned from a research trip in India. Cummings, who teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Art and Art History, traveled for part of the fall semester on a fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), the largest fellowship-granting organization for research in India. The AIIS selects senior and junior scholars for yearlong or short-term grants. Selection of fellows is rigorous, carried out once a year in a marathon session by a panel of scholars drawn from a variety of institutions and representing a careful disciplinary and gender balance.

Cummings traveled to Nagpur, the capital city of the Bhosle dynasty, one of the five ruling families that made up the Maratha confederacy in the 18th century. She went to study Maratha temple architecture under the Nagpur Bhosles from 1740-1853. The temples are an understudied but important part of Hindu architecture and sculpture in stone.

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