History of Art and Architecture

Professor Shaffer specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and architecture in South Asia, Britain, and the British empire. Her first book, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760-1910 (Paul Mellon Centre with Yale University Press, 2022), won an American Institute of Indian Studies Edward C. Dimock, Jr. Prize and an Historians of British Art Book Award. It focuses on Maratha military rulers and British East India Company officials who used the arts to engage in diplomacy, wage war, compete for prestige, and generate devotion as they allied with, or fought against, each other to control western India. This book conceptualizes the artistic combinations that resulted through “graft”—a term that acknowledges the violent and creative processes of suturing arts, and losing and gaining goods, as well as the shifting dynamics among agents who assembled such materials in India and in Britain.

Currently, she is working on her second book, The Belly of Empire: Food, Art, and the Cultivation of Taste across India and Britain, 1750-1850. Focused on river cities and ports in northern India and Britain, this project contends that food propelled artistic production and transformed aesthetic categories in this period, initiating new objects, paintings, and spaces that oriented art towards commerce and the senses. This is part of her wider attention to arts made under the auspices of the East India Company, which are at the heart of two collaborative projects: the exhibition, Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company in India and China, 1750–1850 (2026), which she co-curated with Laurel Peterson, alongside the co-edited exhibition catalogue, published by the Yale Center for British Art, and an essay on the historiography of the art historical term "Company Painting" (2024) jointly authored with Yuthika Sharma.

She has also edited Volume 51 of Ars Orientalis on the Graphic Arts (2021), which focuses on how interlocking practices of making, collecting, compiling, and publishing graphic arts across Asia and between regions in Asia and Europe encouraged the replication, and also the subtle transformation of forms, opening up new possibilities for interpretation. This is part of a continuing project on the migration and reinvention of forms among different media—including paintings, chromolithographic prints, photographic albums, and printed books. 

Her research informs and ties into her teaching. She explores Nineteenth-Century Art in an introductory lecture class through empire, revolution, and new artistic technologies; others focus on South Asian Art and Architecture and Food and Art in the Early Modern World. Like her lecture classes, her seminars on Portraiture, Eclectic Arts, Real and Unreal Landscapes, and Taste draw on theoretical approaches in the eighteenth and nineteenth century alongside historical content and direct object study. She co-teaches in the Brown Arts Institute and in the Cogut’s Collaborative Humanities Program, such as a seminar on Artists and the East India Company in 2026, Heart as Vector: Thinking Across the Arts with Shahzia Sikander in 2024, and Tracing Translations: Artistic Migrations and Reinventions in the Early Modern World in 2019. She also led HIAA’s 2025 Practicum, in which HIAA graduate students curated an exhibition, Building Books with Dayanita Singh, to be shown in Fall 2026 in the Granoff Center For the Creative Arts’ Cohen Gallery. Her classes include working with arts in AnnMary Brown Memorial, the Haffenreffer Museum, the John Hay Special Collections Library, RISD Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Yale Center for British Art.

She is affiliated with the Center for Contemporary South Asia, the Center for Middle East Studies, and Food Studies at Brown, and is in the Society of Fellows at Rare Book School, University of Virginia.