Romita Ray, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in art history in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), has been named a research fellow in the Garden and Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks for the 2026-27 academic year. The fellowship will support the completion of her book manuscript, Leafy Wonder: Art, Science, and the Landscapes of Tea in India.

Dumbarton Oaks is a Harvard University research institute, library, museum and garden in Washington, D.C. Its Garden and Landscape Studies program, established in 1972, supports advanced scholarship in the history of gardens and landscapes from ancient times to the present. Fellows are selected from an international pool of scholars. Ray is one of five research and junior fellows named to the program for the coming year.

The fellowship deepens a connection Ray has cultivated with Dumbarton Oaks. She currently serves on the advisory committee of the institution's Plant Humanities Initiative and taught a module on tea for its Summer 2025 Plant Humanities Summer Program.

Leafy Wonder draws on Ray’s extensive research conducted on tea plantations in India and Sri Lanka, and in archives, museums and private collections across three continents. The project has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Yale Center for British Art, the Lewis Walpole Library, the Royal Museums Greenwich, the Huntington Library and the CUSE Grant Program at Syracuse University.

About Ray

Ray is the author of Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (Yale University Press, 2013), which examines the picturesque tradition in British India. With Richard Coulton (Queen Mary University of London and a former Dumbarton Oaks Fellow) and Jordan Goodman (University College London), she is co-editing Encountering Tea: Histories and Objects, 1650-1850 (forthcoming from UCL Press) — an anthology of essays based on a conference on tea they co-organized in 2022 at the Linnean Society of London. In 2025, she was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a recognition reserved for scholars who have made exceptional contributions to the study of humanity's material past.