Resident Graduate Research Scholar Seminar Series

The UIC Institute for the Humanities presents Resident Graduate Scholar Seminar Series: Dipti Sherchan, UIC Department of Anthropology “A Government for Artists: Making Modern Art/Institution under Monarchy.”

Email huminst@uic.edu to request a copy of the paper ahead of time.

In “The Contested Academy and Proliferating Modernities: The Art of Nation Building in Nepal,” Sherchan examines contestations between artist-subjects and the nation-state over competing imaginaries of what it means to be modern that proliferate over time. These proliferations are emergent in the shifting cultural projects of nation building as the Nepali state undergoes sociopolitical transitions from aristocracy to monarchy to a newly federal republic. This anthropological work engages with an interdisciplinary analytical framework that investigates complex artistic and institutional articulations from the Global South. This research is based on long-term ethnographic and archival research conducted between 2018-22 in Kathmandu.