Dr. Melia Belli

Art History, Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of California Los Angeles
FA-297
meliabelli@uta.edu

Melia Belli received her doctorate in Islamic art history, with a focus on Indo-Islamic art, from the University of California Los Angeles in 2009. She received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Dr. Belli joined the Department of Art and Art History at UTA in 2010 as Assistant Professor of Asian Art History after a holding a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis.  

Dr. Belli’s primary fields of research are interdisciplinary and include north Indian Hindu painting and architecture, contemporary north Indian performance, religious practice, and gender and public identity in contemporary South Asian visual culture. She has published articles on Hindu funerary memorials, central Indian murals of the colonial era, and north Indian men’s folk songs as a gendered form of political and communal resistance. She has also presented papers at national and international conferences including the Association of Asian Studies, the American Academy of Religion, and the Society of Architectural Historians. Her scholarship has been supported by language and research grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Dr. Belli’s current book project examines the forms, meanings, and uses of royal Hindu funerary art in Rajasthan, north India. She is also currently co-editing a volume on women’s expressions of power in South Asia.