Vishal Khandelwal
Professor Khandelwal will be an External Faculty Fellow at the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities, Wellesley College, for the 2025-26 academic year.
Vishal Khandelwal specializes in modern and contemporary architecture, design, art, and visual culture with a focus on South Asia. His current book manuscript analyzes design pedagogy and practice at the National Institute of Design in India through the work of key individuals who taught visual communication, textile design, architecture, and product design at this experimental design school and at other academies in Ahmedabad and beyond between 1955 and 1985. Attentive to the movement of ideas, objects, and people across Europe, North America, and India, it places unlikely systems and agents such as the village, the developing economy, and the rural craftsperson at the very center of art and design theory to explore how pedagogical exchange, intellectual property definition, poverty management, socio-political decolonization, and Cold War politics dovetailed with art and design cultures in India and beyond during the twentieth century. The doctoral dissertation that forms the basis of this manuscript was awarded The UC Berkeley South Asia Art & Architecture Dissertation Prize for 2022. The project has been supported by the 2020 Carter Manny Writing Award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (and a 2019 Citation of Special Recognition for the same award); a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship from the University of Michigan (2020-21); stipends from the Decorative Arts Trust (2019) and the Rockefeller Archive Center (2019); and a Faculty Grant from the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University (2024-25).
A second research project explores intersections between architecture and textile art in modern and contemporary South Asia. Khandelwal participated in the 2021-22 Art Schools of Asia program organized by the Asia Art Archive with support from the Getty Foundation, and the Craft History Workshop organized by Antonia Behan and Colin Fanning with support from Queen’s University.
His publications: "Shaping a Critical Space: Patwant Singh and Writings on Architecture and Design in India" (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, December 2025); "On the Aspirations of Architecture and Design in 20th-Century South Asia" (ARTMargins, June 2023) and “Nelly Sethna and the Reception of Textiles between the United States and India” (The Journal of Modern Craft, November 2021).
Khandelwal completed his B.A. from DePauw University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Prior to his appointment at Harvard, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.