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Full CV

Melia Belli Bose is a specialist in the visual cultures of early modern and contemporary South Asia. She received her PhD in 2009 from the University of California, Los Angeles and her undergraduate and master’s degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Melia has spent several years in different parts of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, studying languages, conducting research, and hiking in the Himalayas. Her research and language study have been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Asian Cultural Council, and the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies.

Prior to joining the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at UVic in 2016, Melia taught at several colleges and universities throughout Southern California and was an Assistant Professor of Asian Art History at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she was awarded tenure and promotion.

Melia’s first book, Royal Umbrellas of Stone: Memory, Politics, and Public Identity in Rajput Funerary Art (Brill, 2015) examines chhatris (funerary memorials) commemorating members of the royal Hindu Rajput community in north India. Melia holds an interest in the arts of death and memorialization throughout Asia. In 2014 she guest-edited and contributed to an edition of the journal Ars Orientalis titled “The Arts of Death in Asia,” which included articles on the subject from China, Japan, India, Thailand, and Central Asia. Another of Melia’s research interests is intersections of gender, power, and art throughout Asia. She edited and contributed to the volume Women, Gender, and Art in Asia ca. 1500-1900 (Routledge, 2016), with essays on women as makers, subjects, collectors, and commissioners of art from across Asia. She is also editor of Intersections: Visual Cultures of Islamic Cosmopolitanism (University of Florida Press, 2021).  Her current edited book project, Threads of Globalization: Fashion, Textiles, and Gender in twentieth-century Asia (contracted with Manchester University Press), examines women’s textile/ garment production and consumption throughout Asia over the long 20th c. Melia has also published articles and book chapters on Maratha painting and architecture; contemporary Buddhist art and architecture, and Rajasthani folk songs. Her current single-authored book project, tentatively titled Creative Interventions: Art and Cultural Activism in Bangladesh, examines artworks that critique, help heal, and create community in a changing Bangladesh. 

Although her research focuses on South Asian art, Melia also greatly enjoys teaching a diverse range of undergraduate and graduate courses on the arts of China, Korea, Japan, and the Islamic World.