History of Art's Sylvia Houghteling Delivers 2025 Tomás Harris Lectures at UCL
Associate Professor of History of Art Sylvia Houghteling held the 2025 Tomás Harris Visiting Professorship at University College London.
Each year, the UCL History of Art department invites an emerging scholar who has already made a significant contribution to art history and visual culture to give two public lectures and a seminar for its research students.
Houghteling’s lectures, which focused on “Textiles and Time in Early Modern South and Southeast Asia,” were held in early May. In addition to the lectures, she led a workshop that explored the material properties and temporal experiences of three short-lived dyes that are at the center of Houghteling’s current research on the art and poetry of early modern dyes in South and Southeast Asia.
This spring, she also gave guest lectures at the University of North Carolina, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, the University of Vermont, the Textile Arts Council of San Francisco, and Pomona College. At the end of April, Houghteling moderated an online workshop with contemporary artists Varunika Saraf and Hamra Abbas as part of the Historians of Islamic Art Association’s workshop series.
This fall, Houghteling will teach The Global Baroque, which examines the Baroque style both within and beyond Europe, and will co-teach the History of Art Senior Conference.