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Rebecca M. Brown is a scholar of colonial and post-1947 South Asian visual culture and politics, and she has served as a consultant and a curator for modern and contemporary Indian art for the Peabody Essex Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. She teaches in History of Art, Political Science, East Asian Studies, Museums and Society, and Women, Gender and Sexuality at Johns Hopkins University, and occasionally in the History of Art at George Washington University. She lectures widely, at venues from the Art Seminar Group of Baltimore to the National Museum of Korea.

Her PhD at the University of Minnesota focused on cities in colonial India, asking how the arrival of the British reshaped urban space in the eighteenth century. Her second major project examined how art negotiates the issues surrounding modernity in newly independent India after 1947. She then turned to a genealogical examination of the imagery of the spinning wheel from the early nineteenth century through to Gandhi’s deployment of it for the nationalist movement. She is currently working on a book that will critically situate the nearly 100 art exhibitions of the 1985-86 Festival of India in the USA; she is also completing an article-length project unsettling our understanding of early 19th century Indian painting.

Her publications include Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection (exhibition and catalog, 2011), Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (Routledge 2010), Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (Duke University Press 2009), A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (coedited with Deborah S. Hutton, Wiley-Blackwell 2011), Asian Art (coedited with Deborah S. Hutton, Blackwell 2006), and articles in Res, Interventions, CSSAAME, Archives of Asian Art, Art Journal, Journal of Urban History, Screen, and Journal of Asian Studies.