Art History Speaker Series — Hunting, Ecology, and the Arts

Talk: The Hunt as Form in Mughal Pictorial History
Speaker: Priyani Roy Choudhury, Visiting Faculty of Visual Arts, Ashoka University, Delhi
When: Tuesday, April 21, 2026 • 12:00–1:15 PM (Mountain Standard Time / MST)
Where: Zoom https://boisestate.zoom.us/j/94075307570

Photo detail from Akbar tiger hunting near Nawar, Gwalior in 1561, 1590-98, Victoria & Albert Museum

This event is free and open to the public

Series Description

Hunting has long occupied a central place in art history—not only in natural history illustrations, grand paintings of human–animal combat, popular prints, and other visual media, but also as the impetus for a wide range of material culture. It produced artifacts as varied as hunting horns, trophies, horse tack, taxidermy, furniture, and fashion. As both a subject of artistic representation and a material practice, hunting offers a compelling lens through which to consider how human intervention shaped attitudes toward the environment, constructed gender roles, and reinforced social hierarchies. Images of the hunt—often defined by direct and violent incursions into nature—came to embody humanity’s presumed dominion over the natural world. To examine these works critically is to gain insight into the historical entanglement of humans and their environment, and into the role of that relationship in shaping cultural and historical identities. Supported by Humanities and Social Studies Initiative (HSSI).

About the Speaker

Priyani Roy Choudhury is an independent research scholar based in New Delhi, specializing in Mughal art and architecture. She has been a Visiting Faculty at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. Between 2013-16, she was a doctoral fellow at the Museum of Islamic Arts (The Museum für Islamische Kunst) in Berlin. Her ongoing research project on Fatehpur Sikri is a close engagement with the visual language of the imperial city as it unfolds through its architecture, spatial arrangement, and ornamental design. She has also actively engaged with painting traditions from the 14th-19th centuries, studying the connections between the aesthetic practices of South Asia and those of Central Asia, Iran, Western China, the Indian Ocean littoral, as well as Europe.