Anna Lise Seastrand

My research has focused on early modern southeastern India, with a broad interest in the embodied experience of sacred space. My publications have been motivated by questions about the relationship between text, narrative and image; the nature of portraiture; the depiction and functions of landscape.

My first book, Body, History, Myth: South Indian Murals, 1550-1800, reconceives art and devotion in the South Indian temple through an intertextual reading of painting, architecture, and literary sources. From the perspective of a viewing body in motion, my interpretations of the murals in situ conceptualize viewers as participants, resisting the valorization of a static beholder in favor of one who co-produces the mural in their somatic and imaginative experience of the visual images. The book also tells a story of intellectual, social, religious, and political transformations of early modern southeastern India that situates them in the broader history of South Asian art and within the transformations of the early modern world. It is the winner of the of the 2022 Edward S. Cameron Dimock Prize in the Indian Humanities from the American Institute of Indian Studies for best book manuscript in the Indian Humanities. It was also awarded the 2025 book prize for Religion and the Arts from the American Academy of Religion, which recognizes new scholarly publications that make significant contributions to the study of religion and the arts. In 2026, the book was given an Honorable Mention for the Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize, which honors outstanding and innovative scholarship on South Asia.

For the past ten years I have been part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers studying set of interconnected temples in southeastern region of India known as Pandya Nadu. We have co-written an open-access book that will be coming out with Heidelberg University Publishing, Temple of the Heart: Making a Home for Viṣṇu at Tirukkurungudi. This project has been supported by the Davis Humanities Institute, the Indian Culture and Heritage Trust, and the American Academy of Religion.

My second monograph, tentatively titled Trees and the Ecologies of Art in South India, explores the many meanings of trees in southeast Indian art and religious practice in light of their changing social, economic, artistic, religious, and environmental ecologies. I was awarded a Fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks (2022-23) to develop this project.

I have collaborated at the University of Minnesota with Colin McFadden (LATIS) on digital archival projects related to my archive of southeast Indian art and architecture. We have presented our work at  Theorizing Early Modern Studies workshops, and mentored undergraduate student projects through the Dean's First Year Research and Creative Scholars initiative and the Library's Data Squad.

I was a Visiting Scholar at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago (2017-2021), which supported a multidisciplinary team focused on the “interwoven” sonic and visual histories of the Indian Ocean world. This project grew out of a multi-year collaboration with scholars, collectors, and institutions across South Asia interested in the digitization of sonic and visual archives held in both public and private collections. This project grew out of a series of workshops on the digitization of sonic and visual archives we organized in Delhi, Colombo, Kandy, and Kathmandu. We worked with people representing a wide variety of institutions and collections from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, USA, Germany, and the UK to develop best practices for digitization and a framework for open linked data to make archives widely and freely available. The last iteration of the project, Passage Through the Place of Peace: Bāuls, Bôyātis, and Bengali Modernism focused on modernism in Bengali art, music, architecture, and education, from the first Bauhaus exhibition of 1922 to the present in 2022. We explored this extraordinary period of innovation as a series of journeys, joining with academics, artists, and musicians in workshops, site visits, and academic paper sessions on traditional and modern aesthetic practices. Through these collaborative, cross-disciplinary partnerships, we traced the interwoven narratives of Bengal’s history of modernism with both the better-known histories of modernism in the West, as well as to the lesser-known traditions of East and Southeast Asia.

In addition to those mentioned above, my research has also been supported by fellowships in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and the University of Chicago; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery (CASVA); and the American Institute of Indian Studies.