Congratulations to Cornell History of Art PhD graduate Kaitlin Emmanuel!
Dissertation title: “Tamil Diaspora Art of War/Post-War Sri Lanka”
Committee: Iftikhar Dadi (chair), Anne M. Blackburn (Asian Studies, co-chair), and Arnika Fuhrmann (Asian Studies).
Kaitlin’s areas of inquiry include popular media as a site of memory making, dissident visual cultures, and geographies of belonging in diasporas of the Global South. She received a BA in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley (2011), followed by an MA in Asian Studies from Cornell University (2017), in which she examined the socio-political legacies that condition art making in Sri Lanka’s modernist avant-garde.
In Summer 2024, Kaitlin published a peer-reviewed essay titled “Visionary or Voyeur: Lionel Wendt and the Contradictions of Late Colonial Modernity in Ceylon” in the leading scholarly Art Journal, a flagship journal published by the College Art Association. She has also contributed essays to the journals Third Text and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures & the Americas, as well as the Lahore Biennale Reader 01.
Her dissertation project focused on the mobilization of visual production in response to state persecution and violence in Sri Lanka from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Sri Lanka’s war disproportionately devastated regions with Tamil-majority populations, thus producing a vast diaspora of Tamil asylum seekers around the world. She analyzes Tamil diasporic artistic practices to examine the multiplicity of geographies and temporalities that emerged over decades of war, for which the categories of diaspora and nation cannot be cleanly separated.
Starting Fall 2025, Kaitlin will be the Singh Postdoctoral Associate at the MacMillan Center at Yale University, with a secondary Lecturer appointment in the Department of History of Art.
