Iftikhar Dadi

Iftikhar Dadi is John H. Burris Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Art, Director of the South Asia Program, and board member of the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. He researches modern and contemporary art from a transnational perspective, with an emphasis on methodology and intellectual history, and a focus on South and West Asia. Another research interest examines the film, media, and popular cultures of South Asia, seeking to understand how emergent publics forge new avenues for civic participation. He has authored The Lahore Effect: Cinema Between Realism and Fable (2022), Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010) and edited The Lahore Biennale Reader 01 (2022) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (2015). He has co-edited Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2012); Tarjama/Translation (2009); and Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (2001). Dadi is an advisor to Asia Art Archive and serves on the editorial and advisory boards of ArtMargins, Archives of Asian Art and Bio-Scope: South Asian Screen Studies and was a member of the editorial board of Art Journal (2007-11). He received his PhD from Cornell University. As an artist, Iftikhar Dadi collaborates with Elizabeth Dadi to make work that explores questions of identity and borders, and the capacities of the informal urban realm in the Global South.