Sussan Babaie is Professor in the Arts of Iran and Islam at The Courtauld, University of London. A graphic designer by training (BA, Tehran University), she earned her PhD in Art History from IFA, New York University. Among her publications are Isfahan and Its Palaces (2008, 2018) and Persian Kingship and Architecture (2015) edited with Talinn Grigor, as well as on modern and contemporary arts of Iran and West Asia. She is currently working collaboratively on several projects focusing on the arts across trans-Asian networks: co-editor with Stephen Whiteman and author, Cultural History of Asian Art, six-volume series (Bloomsbury); co-curator of an exhibition on the Arts of the Great Mongol World; and lead scholar on Mongol Connections, a traveling seminar supported by Getty Connecting Art Histories.

Keynote Iran: Modernity, Photography and the Painter’s Dilemma >

Stephen Whiteman【魏瑞明】is a historian whose research draws on art and architectural history, cultural geography, and technology studies to explore the visual and spatial cultures of early modern and modern China. Author of the award-winning Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe, his work has been supported by the British Academy, the Getty Foundation, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, and Dumbarton Oaks, amongst others. He is coeditor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin and a Trustee of the Association for Art History, and currently serves as Professor of the Art and Architecture of China at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

Keynote On Heroic Maps: Imagining ‘China’ in Premodern Geo-bodies and Modern Historiography >

Hala Auji is associate professor of art history and the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair for Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research focuses on Arabic visual and print culture, the history of publishing, and the circulation of images in the nineteenth-century eastern Mediterranean. She is the author of Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016), and co-editor of The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Islamic Art History and the Global Turn: Theory, Method, Practice (Yale University Press, 2026).

Panel 3 Transforming the Image: Artisans, Visual Knowledge, and Translocality in Arabic Print Culture >

Kit Brooks joined the Princeton University Art Museum as the curator of Asian art in 2024 and is a specialist in Japanese art history. Prior to their appointment, Brooks was the Japan Foundation Assistant Curator of Japanese Art at the National Museum of Asian Art (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC). Their recent exhibition projects include Staging the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater in Japanese Prints (2024) and Ay-Ō’s Happy Rainbow Hell (2023), the first exhibition dedicated to the psychedelic Japanese Fluxus artist Ay-Ō (born 1931) organized in the United States. Brooks also curated Living Proof: Drawing in Nineteenth Century Japan (2017) at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO) and Uncanny Japan: The Art of Yoshitoshi (2015) at Worcester Museum of Art (Worcester, MA), among others. Brooks earned their PhD in art history from Harvard University in 2017, with a dissertation focused on the materiality of surimono prints in the nineteenth century.

Brooks’ latest publication, Takeda Hideo’s Genpei: Defying Authority, accompanies their current exhibition, of the same title, which opened at Princeton on August 30th. The exhibition reconsiders the work for which Takeda is best known, a series of silkscreens portraying battle scenes from the twelfth century Genpei War, against the context of ero-guro nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsense) aesthetics and the student protest movement. Brooks’ current research project examines the depiction of wolves throughout Japanese art history.

Panel 2 The Extinction and Visualization of Japanese Wolves in the Meiji era (1868–1912) >

Preeti Chopra is professor of visual studies and architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in the visual, spatial, and cultural landscapes of South Asia and the British empire.  She trained as an architect (CEPT, Ahmedabad), landscape architect, urban designer and planner, and architectural historian (University of California, Berkeley) and has conducted research in western and southern India.  Chopra is the author of A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). She is currently working on a second book on colonial Bombay.  In addition to these book projects, Chopra has published on a range of subjects that includes charity and philanthropy, naming practices, photographs of civil disobedience, colonialism and world histories of architecture, and French colonial urbanism in Pondicherry.  Chopra has received numerous research grants and fellowships, including the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS) fellowship. Most recently she was the recipient of the 2023 Suzanne Deal Booth Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome.

Panel 1 Opium Elites and the Making of an Indian Statuary Tradition in Colonial Bombay >

Talinn Grigor is Professor of Art and Architectural History at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on late 18^th– to 20^th-century histories through postcolonial, race, feminist, and critical theories grounded in Iran, Armeno-Iran, Armenia, and Parsi India. Her books include the winner of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2025 and Western Association of Women Historians’ Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award, The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity (coauthored with Houri Berberian, 2025); the winner of the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award, The Persian Revival (2021); Persian Kingship and Architecture (coedited with Sussan Babaie, 2015); Contemporary Iranian Art (2014); and Building Iran (2009). She is currently a chief coeditor of the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies and a field editor for Encyclopædia Iranica.

Panel 1 Postcards, Hotels, and Hospitable Minorities: Armenian and Parsi Urbanity Networking a British Empire >

Yeewan Koon is Associate Dean (Global) in the Faculty of Arts, Chair of the Department of Art History, and Director of the MA in Art History and the MA in Museum Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on Guangdong art history and contemporary art in Asia. Her publications include The Defiant Brush: Su Renshan and the Politics of 19th Century Guangdong Art (2014), “A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art” in 18th Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies (Bloomsbury Academic Press) and “Marks and Manifestations: Religious Art by Su Renshan” in China 1800: Visual and Material Culture (British Museum Press), among other publications. She has held fellowships and visiting scholarships at Cambridge University and Columbia University, and received a Fulbright Senior Researcher Award. Her current research includes overseeing the first digital timeline of Hong Kong art history. In 2022 she received the prestigious UGC Teacher Award. Her curatorial projects include exhibitions at the Helsinki Biennale, Asia Society Hong Kong Centre, and the 12th Gwangju Biennale.

Panel 3 Seen from Within: Tingqua, Alterity, and Artistic Agency in China Trade Painting >

Born in the cosmopolitan village of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Boreth Ly is an associate professor of Southeast Asian art history and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He coedited with Nora A. Taylor, Modern and Contemporary Art of Southeast Asia (2012). In addition, he has written numerous articles and essays on the arts and films of Southeast Asia and its diaspora. Academically trained as an art historian, Ly employs multidisciplinary methods and theories in his writings and analysis, depending on the subject matter. One of his research areas focuses on the intersection between memory and historical trauma. He authored, Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide (University of Hawai’i Press, 2022).

Panel 2 Khmer Royal and Noble Chedey (stupas) as Markers of Family Lineage and Politics at the Time of Shifting Political Regimes >

Suppya Hélène Nut is a scholar and practitioner specialising in Cambodian Court Theatre (lokhon luang) and the Royal Ballet of Cambodia. She teaches Southeast Asian arts and history at INALCO and Université Paris Cité. Her research combines archival analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and embodied practice, drawing on extensive interviews with artists in Cambodia and across the diaspora. A former dancer, teacher, and administrator within the Ballet Classique Khmer in Paris, she brings a practice-based perspective to the study of performance. Her work explores the relationships between performance, power, memory, and identity, particularly in the contexts of colonialism, post-conflict reconstruction, and cultural diplomacy.

Panel 2 Khmer Royal and Noble Chedey (stupas) as Markers of Family Lineage and Politics at the Time of Shifting Political Regimes >

Sugata Ray is Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian art and architecture in the Departments of History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and writing focus on climate change and the arts from the 1500s onwards. Ray’s recent books include Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019; awarded the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain’s Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion and the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and the Arts Book Award) and Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (coedited; 2020). He is currently writing a book on the question of the animal and animality in the early modern period.

Panel 3 (Mis)Translating James Gibbs: Neoclassical Mosques and the Architecture of a Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean World >