Romita Ray
Romita Ray is Associate Professor of Art History at Syracuse University in the United States. She holds MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees in art history from Yale University and a BA degree in art history from Smith College.
Ray has published widely on the art and architecture of the British Empire in India. The author of Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (2013) and The Eternal Masquerade: Prints and Paintings by Gerald Leslie Brockhurst (1890–1978) from the Jacob Burns Foundation (2006), Ray is currently working on a book on the visual cultures of tea in colonial and modern India tentatively titled, Leafy Wonders: Art, Science, and the Aesthetics of Tea in India. Her tea research led to the international conference, “Tea, Nature, Culture, and Society, 1650–1850,” she co-organized at the Linnean Society (2022) with Richard Coulton and Jordan Goodman.
Together with Jos Hackforth-Jones, she is co-editing a multi-volume project for Routledge on art, architecture, material culture, and early cinema in the British empire (forthcoming, 2025–26). Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Royal Museums Greenwich, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Centre, Huntington Library, and Houghton Library.
Ray is the director of the NEH-funded Taj of the Raj: Decolonizing the Imperial Collections, Architecture, and Gardens of the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, an international collaborative research project involving scholars from the UK, USA, and India (2021–2023).
She is also the curator of Take Me to the Palace of Love (SU Art Museum), an NEA-funded exhibition of contemporary Indian American artist Rina Banerjee’s work (Spring 2023), which was awarded a 2024 Engaging Communities Distinction Award from the Museum Association of New York. Ray serves as Executive Board Member at Large for the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS) and is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks.