Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Margaret Masselli is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. Her research on the arts of 18th-century South Asia centers artistic mediums such as ivory and mica as vectors for artists’ engagement with material phenomena alongside their role as commodities in imperial networks. The digital humanities certificate program has supported her development of a database uniting dozens of now physically disparate portraits of eighteenth-century political elites. Bringing these works together has allowed for new subject identifications, while her project directs digital tools toward questions of artistic practice and production. She holds an M.A. in Art History from Columbia University and a B.A. in History from Wesleyan University. More recently, she contributed to the exhibit and catalog for the show Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850 at the Yale Center for British Art.