Performing and Visual Arts
Research Interests: Modern South Asian History; History of Photography; Global Modernism; Contemporary Art; Intellectual History of Art; Art Historiography; Postcolonial Studies
Profile
Professor Ranu Roychoudhuri is Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University and is a historian of modern and contemporary art, focusing on South Asia, photography, print history, intellectual histories of art, art historiography, and postcolonial studies. She has published on the inherently cosmopolitan character of photography, underscoring its relationship with other media practices in the backdrop of British colonialism and India's postcolonial condition. Her scholarship particularly nurtures the genres and the artists that often slip through the cracks of history.
Professor Roychoduhuri received her PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from The University of Chicago and held tenure-track and tenured positions at Nalanda University and the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati and served as Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer at Yale University.
Selected Publications
Books
Peer-reviewed journal articles
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, "Aesthetic of Light and Time: An Intellectual History of Pictorialism from India," South Asian Studies, 40(1), 25-45 (2024). DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2024.2338996
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, “Notes on Historiography of Photographs from India,” History Compass, 21(5), e12763 (May, 2023). DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12763
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, “Photographs of People, Monument for a City” in a special issue, titled “Discovery of India(s): Resisting the National Biography,” of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 41(3) 658–680 (2018). DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2018.1488514
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, “Documentary Photography, Decolonization, and the Making of ‘Secular Icons’: Reading Sunil Janah’s Photographs from the 1940s through the 1950s,” Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, 8(1) 46– 80 (2017). DOI: 10.1177/0974927617717898
Chapters in Edited Volumes
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, “An Aesthetic of Pattern: The Colonial Camera and the People of India,” in Typecasting: Photographing the People of India 1855-1920, edited by Sudeshna Guha (New Delhi: DAG, 2026).
- Ranu Roychoudhuri and Rebecca Brown, “Industry, Documentary, Aesthetics: Postcolonial Indian Photography in a Global Frame,” in Documenting Industry: Photography, Aesthetics, and Labor in India, Visual and Media Histories series, edited by Ranu Roychoudhuri and Rebecca Brown (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2025), 01—10.
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, “The Art of Belonging in the Imagined Homeland” in Framing Portraits, Binding Albums: Family Photographs in India edited by Suryanandini Narain and Shilpi Goswamy (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2025), 360—380.
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, "Intermediality and Cosmopolitanism: Photography and Activism in Postcolonial Calcutta," in Points of View: Defining Moments in Photography in India, edited by Gayatri Sinha (New Delhi: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2022), 204—221.
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, "Photographing Jamshedpur's Industrialscape in a Nehruvian India," in Jamshedpur: 100 Years and Counting (Mumbai: Tata Steel and The Marg Foundation, 2020), 113—123.
Book/Exhibition reviews
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, "Futures That Never Came: Traces of (Im)possible Bombays," Book review: Robert Stephens, Bombay Imagined: An Illustrated History of the Unbuilt City (2022), Journal of Heritage Management, 1-3(2025).
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, “The Street and the Gallery: Shahidul Alam’s Archives of Practices,” review of the retrospective show Singed But Not Burnt (Emami Art, Kolkata, 19 June–20 August, 2022), Take on Art: Memory, Issue 28 (December 2022), 137-139.
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, “The Art of Witnessing: Sunil Janah and India’s Industrial Modernization,” review of the exhibition Sunil Janah/Making a Photograph (Experimenter—Ballygunge Place, Kolkata, on view Feb 03—Mar 26, 2022), Critical Collective, February 2022
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, “Celluloid Histories and Futures: Art Cinema in India,” review of Rochona Majumdar’s Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), Critical Collective, December 2021
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, “Looking through the Portal: Photographs, Lives, Histories,” review of Portal: The Curious Case of Achintya Bose (2020), Critical Collective, November 2021. https://criticalcollective.in/NoticeboardInner.aspx?Id=454
- Ranu Roychoudhuri, Review article: Chandak Sengoopta’s The Rays Before Satyajit: Creativity and Modernity in Colonial India (2016) in South Asian History and Culture (2018). DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2018.1535559
Teaching
Professor Roychoudhuri teaches the following courses:
FYIS126 Lenses, Archives, Histories
FDP Democracy and Justice Studio (Co-taught)
FDP Water Studio (Co-taught)
PVA101 Exploring Studio Art (Co-taught)
PVA220 Artistic Practices in Modern South Asia
PVA222 Seeing Photographs
PVA333 Global History of Photography