Congratulations to Ayesha Matthan, PhD ‘26!
Dissertation title: "Looking for Bombay: Photography, Labor, and the Struggle for Space, 1960s-1990s"
Committee: Iftikhar Dadi (Chair), Neema Kudva (City & Regional Planning), Durba Ghosh (History), and Seema Golestaneh (Anthropology)
Ayesha’s dissertation investigates the visual and political transformation of late-twentieth-century Bombay as it transitioned into the global financial hub of Mumbai. By analyzing an array of multilingual archives, official records, and documentary photography, the project traces how the physical erasure of the working class from the urban landscape was actively mediated yet curiously subverted through an ambivalent photographic frame. She argues that as state and elite actors sought a pristine, global image, the laboring body was systematically marginalized and reframed as a symbol of economic precarity. Ultimately, her work reveals how the struggle for urban space in modern India was fiercely contested through the camera lens, demonstrating that the photographic image remained a volatile site of both elite enforcement and subaltern refusal.
Ayesha's areas of inquiry include labor, urban studies, and the everyday. She has presented at the Annual Frick Symposium at the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU), the Annual Conference on South Asia at UW-Madison, the Cornell South Asia Program, the Bangalore International Centre, and the Tate Modern in London.
Ayesha received a BA from St. Stephen's College (University of Delhi), a PG Diploma in Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, and an MA and MPhil in Visual Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In India, she worked as an arts journalist for The Hindu, and as a research scholar and editor at the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, and the India Foundation for the Arts.
Her essays on the visual politics of labor, race, caste, gender, and culture have been published by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Routledge, the National Museum (New Delhi), the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, and DAG Modern (India).
Starting Fall 2026, Ayesha will be Scholar-in-Residence in the Department of History of Art at VCUarts Qatar.Congratulations to Ayesha Matthan, PhD ‘26!
