Deepthi Murali
Hello! I don’t know how you got here but welcome! I am currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. I am also an affiliate faculty at Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media at GMU. I work on digital public history projects focused on material culture. I am an art historian of South Asia and a digital public historian. My research generally examines decorative arts made of wood, ivory, and cotton in littoral South India, mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
My major research project at present is Connecting Threads, a digital public history project that traces the history of striped and checked cotton textiles produced in eighteenth-century southeastern India and used by communities of color in the Greater Caribbean Region. This project brings together Indian cotton textiles in multiple museum collections across US and UK and archival documents of trade in these textiles to weave together the history of production of these textiles by lower-caste Indian weavers and the many ways in which these modest textiles helped foster cultural and community identities for free and enslaved people of color in the Caribbean. This project is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. My secondary DH project at present explores the possibilities of using computational analysis methods in the field of art history. This project titled Digital Chintz uses eighteenth-century chintz textiles in North American museum collections and associated museum metadata as a test case for this study.
I am also the Principal Investigator for HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium project, a digital public history project led by The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
I also used to have a podcast called Masala History that discusses historical events and figures from South Asia 1500-1900. This podcast is currently on a long hiatus but it is coming back in 2025.
This website currently contain bits and pieces of all these things that I am part of, but it was largely set up as a dissertation website. My dissertation titled Transculturality, Sensoriality, and Politics of the Decorative Arts of Kerala, India looked at 18th and 19th century wood and ivory objects from the courts of Travancore and Cochin in Kerala, India and the colonial and transcultural implications of their production, circulation, use. This website is where I "brain dumped" a lot of material. My blog posts in the "Research on Kerala" folder were works-in-progress in which you'll surely encounter things that you have not seen, and places and people you have not heard of before. If you want to know more about them, drop me a line!
I am revamping the website to show more of my current and future research so stay tuned.
Other projects I have worked on at the Center from 2020-2022 as a postdoctoral fellow:
I love podcasts and public history, so of course, I dabble in it personally as well. My friend and I run the Masala History podcast where we talk about different historical topics related to South Asia. We are on an extended sabbatical but we will back in 2024. Do check us out! If you want to talk to me, the best place is Bluesky Social (@deepthimurali.bsky.social).