Professor Romita Ray has three publications hot off the press: "On the Prowl: Tigers and the Tea Planter in British India" in Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire, edited by Ve-Yin Tee (Edinburgh University Press) and “The ‘Clumsy’ Lion? Disruptions and Darshan in Pushpamala N.’s Imaging of Mother India” in Motherland: Pushpamala N.’s Woman and Nation, edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy and Monica Juneja (Roli Books). Her review of the exhibition, In Sparkling Company: Glass and the Costs of Social Life in Britain During the 1700s (Corning Museum of Glass, May 22, 2021-January 2, 2022) was published in Journal18 https://www.journal18.org/6185.
“On the Prowl” focuses on Professor Ray’s ongoing research on wildlife in tea plantations about which she gave a virtual lecture recently, on April 19, at the University of North Bengal in Siliguri, India. “The ‘Clumsy’ Lion” analyzes acclaimed Indian artist Pushpamala N.’s photo-performances as Mother India. For this publication, Ray studied a unique collection of images of the goddess Durga in the H. Daniel Smith Poster Archive in the Special Collections Research Center.
Together with Professor Jordan Goodman (University College London) and Professor Richard Coulton (Queen Mary University of London), Professor Ray organized a three-day international conference about tea titled, Tea: Nature, Culture, Society, 1650-1850, at the Linnean Society of London (June 22-24, 2022). The Linnean Society is the world’s oldest active society devoted to natural history. The conference was co-sponsored by the Linnean Society of London, Syracuse University, and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. Professor Ray thanks SU alumnus Todd B. Rubin (’04) for his generous support.
On Thursday, May 5, Professor Ray gave a joint virtual lecture at The University of Sydney, Australia, with Dr. Jos Hackforth-Jones (retired Director, Sotheby’s Institute of Art), about their forthcoming four-volume project for Routledge titled, Empire and Cultural Change: Visual Arts, Film, and Architecture.