Neelima Jeychandran

is an Assistant Professor of African Visual Culture in the Department of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar. She is an ethnographer, editor, and scholar who works on oceanic crossovers and material histories of West and East Africa and western India with research interests in trade objects, visual cultures, rituals, architectures of memory, and spatial (re)fabulation of legacies of slavery. At VCUarts Qatar, she runs a research lab called “Global Asia: Mobilities and Arts.

GA: MA LAB

At VCUarts Qatar, she runs a research lab called “Global Asia: Mobilities and Arts.

Work

She is co-editor of the book Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (Routledge, 2020) and the co-editor of the Verge journal issue on “Indian Ocean Studies, African-Asian Affinities” (2022), and the series co-editor of the Routledge Indian Ocean and Trans-Asia book series.

Prior Work

Before joining VCUarts Qatar, she taught in the Department of Asian Studies and the African Studies Program at The Pennsylvania State University. At Penn State, she was the co-convenor of the research group Indian Oceanologies, a multi-campus working group that explores contemporary lives, spaces, and relational practices in the Indian Ocean.

Edited Journal

She is the co-editor of the Verge journal issue on “Indian Ocean Studies, African-Asian Affinities.”

Upcoming Manuscript

She is finishing her book Textured Pasts: Material Heritage and Traces of African-Asian Relations in the Oceanic South, in which she considers the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds in relational terms by examining material and immaterial circuits of exchange.

GA: MA LAB Activities

Global Asia: Mobilities and Arts Lab (GA: MA Lab) is an interdisciplinary and collaborative project which stems from a shared urgency of studying art and its histories beyond the established Euro-American academic framework on what constitutes the “global”. The Lab centers its inquiries on alternative archives of art/culture, spaces in transitions, and places that translate histories of here and elsewhere from an interdisciplinary and grounded perspective.