Research Seminar | Tiger Tiger Burning Bright: Framed Within Imperial Night

Research Seminar | Tiger Tiger Burning Bright: Framed Within Imperial Night

Wednesday 28 October, 4.15 – 5.30pm

Lecture Room 1, Arts Building, University of Birmingham

Drop-in, free

A research seminar hosted by the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies. With Dr. Anisha Palat, Heritage Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh.

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, the conquest of animal life became central to the visualisation of British identity and imperial power. This conquest was highlighted in photographs that staged British hunters over the bodies of dead animals, most often tigers. Drawing on such photographs and supplementary texts from diverse archival sources, this paper approaches photography as a critical site through which human-animal relations were staged under empire.

The paper examines these photographs in a new light, shifting attention from the pride and triumph of the hunt, to instead look at ecological erasure through the death of the animal, marginalised figures, and landscapes. These photographs thus are removed from their associations with triumph, but looked at as visual records of erasure whose afterlives continue to shape ecological memory and historical consciousness.

The seminar will be followed by a drinks reception from 5:30 – 6:30pm in the Mason Lounge, Arts Building, University of Birmingham.

A black and white photograph. Two english aristocrats, Lord and Lady Curzon, stand over two dead tigers they have hunted in India.
Lord and Lady Curzon with First Day’s Bag in Camp near Nekonda, Hyderabad, 1902. Photograph by Lala Deen Dayal, India, 1902. National Army Museum, Study collection.

About the speaker

Dr Anisha Palat is an art historian whose research explores the intersections of visual culture, animals, caste, colonialism, and the environmental humanities in South Asia. She is currently a Heritage Postdoctoral Research Fellow at IASH, University of Edinburgh. Her current research examines colonial-era hunting photography in India, exploring how photographic images mediated relationships between empire, animals, and the environment. Anisha’s first monograph, Aesthetic Ecologies: The Cow, Caste and Contemporary Art in India, is forthcoming in 2027 with Manchester University Press in January 2027, she will join Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, as a Research Fellow.

Access

  • The Arts building has step-free access and automatic doors at the entrance
  • There is step-free access throughout the building, and a lift to other floors
  • There is an accessible toilet on the ground floor
  • for more information, see AccessAble or feel free to contact our team at [email protected]