Photo: Patricia Canino
Divya Kumar-Dumas deploys frameworks, methods, and practices from environmental and landscape history and theory to open and enable multiple trans-regional academic discourses from pre-modern South Asia's primary archaeological and textual sources.
She holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, Department of South Asia Studies, and a BA from Yale University, Department of History. She also has been trained in the practice and theory of Landscape Design at George Washington University and the University of Maryland. The architectural historian Michael W. Meister, W. Norman Brown Professor Emeritus, History of Art, supervised her dissertation alongside landscape theorist and historian John Dixon Hunt, Professor Emeritus, Landscape Architecture, PennDesign, and Indologist Deven M. Patel, Associate Professor, South Asia Studies, and Director of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. She now collaborates across disciplines with various specialists worldwide to scale up the triangulation strategies developed in her dissertation, "The Experience of Early Designed Landscape in South Asia: Sigiriya, Sri Lanka and Mamallapuram, India," to bring texts, images, and objects together in new ways, extending our knowledge of past places and environments.
At ISAW, she considers the first-millennium Indian Ocean port – a landscape type known primarily from its exports. Digital tools help locate and define Indian and Sri Lankan ports by bringing South Asian sources into interdisciplinary conversation with those from an interconnected, diverse ancient world. Related papers about a range of first-millennium artifactual finds of South Asian manufacture excavated far from the subcontinent, "Indian Ocean Figures that Sailed Away," is expected in 2024 (Brepols, co-edited with Valentina A. Grasso).
Other affiliations include the UPenn South Asia Center, the Department of History of Art, Design & Visual Culture at MICA, and the Space for the Creative Black Imagination. Currently, she is an IDEAS Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), preparing a monograph entitled The Frisson of Poetry on a Wall in Lanka, which will offer an alternative reading to the archaeological gardens of the World Heritage Site of Sigiriya, Sri Lanka. She also publishes on the role played by plants, designed landscapes, and nature in early India. Recent work on this subject can be found in A Cultural History of Plants and the forthcoming A Cultural History of Nature (Bloomsbury).
She has been the recipient of awards including the Fulbright Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS), US Department of Education, École Française d' Extrême-Orient (EFEO), American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS), Central Cultural Fund Government of Sri Lanka, Dumbarton Oaks, Salvatori Italian Studies, Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and state and regional arts agencies. She has remained affiliated to ISAW since she was a Visiting Research Scholar, 2021-22.