Sonal Khullar has joined Penn’s history of art department as the W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies. Dr. Khullar came to Penn from the University of Washington, where she was an associate professor of art history. Her research, which focuses on the art of South Asia from the 18th century onward, has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Japan Foundation. 

Dr. Khullar’s first book, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930-1990, received the Bernard S. Cohn Prize of the Association for Asian Studies and the Millard Meiss Publication Award and Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award of the College Art Association. Her second book, The Art of Dislocation: Conflict and Collaboration in Contemporary Art from South Asia, is under contract with University of California Press. She is editing a volume, From Kitabkhana [Library] to Karkhana [Workshop]: The Arts of the Book in South Asia, under contract with the University of Washington Press. 

The W. Norman Brown Professorship in South Asian Studies was established anonymously in 1981 in honor of the late Penn Professor W. Norman Brown. Dr. Brown advanced the study of the South Asian subcontinent throughout his career. Founder of the first academic department of South Asian Studies (which was at Penn), he spent the early part of his life in India and was a leading scholar of that region.