The Space welcomes Divya Kumar-Dumas

​​Photo credit: Patricia Canino

Divya Kumar-Dumas is a historian of South Asian art and architecture, specializing in the designed landscapes of first millennium South Asia. Influenced by methods from studies of word and image, gardens and landscapes, archaeology and text, cultural and oral histories, and folk and traditional arts, she treats built landscapes as conceptually driven architectural projects of the past and invitations to experience a place over its long, layered afterlife. She finds this phenomenon of 'place-ness' key to reading cultural and design histories within the landscapes of first millennium South Asia. Currently a research affiliate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at NYU, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Art History, Theory, & Criticism at MICA, she received her PhD from the Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation reads two well-known archaeological sites as designed landscapes from their visitor records and archaeological traces. 

Her first monograph, The Frisson of Poetry on a Wall in Lanka, treats an important landscape architectural moment in the life of Sigiriya, an archaeological site in Sri Lanka, when more than 1,800 visitors recorded their experience of the place by writing onto a wall built onto its metamorphic rock face. This seventh-century architectural intervention tells an occluded story about the site from which the book argues that the designed landscape of Sigiriya constructed new literary communities writing in Sinhala to transform events in the cultural history of Lanka. It grapples with place-making, community-building, and the role of writing and design in those processes. She has published on Sigiriya in Orientations (Jan/Feb 2018) and Art, Architecture, and the Moving Viewer, c. 300–1500 CE: Unfolding Narratives, G. Elliott and A. Heath, eds. (Brill 2022).