Frederick M. Asher

Professor

Office: 306 Heller Hall

Office Hours - Fall 2009

Tues, Weds: 11:15 - 12:00
and by appointment

Phone: (612) 624-3569
Fax: (612) 626-8679

Frederick Asher is a specialist in South Asian art also interested in the developing field of world art history. His current research considers historiographic issues, the architecture of contested religious space and the issue of copying/originality in Indian art. Recent scholarship has focused on contested religious space, issues related to art as commodity, particularly looking at patterns of trade as they relate to works of art in India, and the site of Bodhgaya. He also has examined present-day artists working in traditional modes both because they are interesting in themselves and because they offer models for pre-modern modes of artistic production; they further offer the opportunity to think about the role of the artist in art history that has focused primarily on the product. He has concluded a term as Editor-in-Chief of caa.reviews, the electronic journal of the College Art Association and serves Chair of the Board of Trustees of the American Institute of Indian Studies. He is President of the National Committee for the History of Art, and South Asia editor for Archives of Asian Art.

Select publications include:, The Art of Eastern India: 300-800 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, l980); Art of India (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2002); Bodhgaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007) “Maurya Figural Sculpture Reconsidered,” with Walter M. Spink, Ars Orientalis, vol.XIX (1989):1-25; “Artists of Patharkati and Jaipur: Models for Pre-Modern Modes of Production,” South Asian Studies, vol.XI (1995): 19-26; “Stone and the Production of Images,” East and West, vol.48 (1998): 313-328; “An Image at Lakhi Serai and Its Implications,” Artibus Asiae, LIX, 3/4 (2000): 296-302; “Early Indian Art Reconsidered,” In: Patrick Olivelle, ed. Between The Empires; Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 51-66; “The Shape of Indian Art History,” In: Vishakha Desai, ed. Asian Art History in the Twenty-first Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 3-14. Forthcoming publications include an historiographic study of sites associated with the Buddha’s life, forthcoming in Artibus Asiae, an historiographic article on art of the third century century BCE forthcoming in a volume being published by Routledge, and a work on What is an Image in a forthcoming book edited by James Elkins.

Asher’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Asian Cultural Council. He is recipient of the Horace T. Morse-University of Minnesota Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education

Site last modified on September 3, 2009

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