About
Jinah Kim is the George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Harvard University's Department of History of Art & Architecture. She holds a concurrent appointment in South Asian Studies and serves as the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director in the Arts at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2022-2025). Previously, she led the Arts program at the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute and served as ACSAA's Vice President (2018-2022) and current President (2022-2026). Her academic journey includes teaching at Vanderbilt University (2006-2011) and Rutgers University (2011-2012) before joining Harvard in 2012.
Educated at Seoul National University (B.A., 1998) and UC Berkeley (M.A., 2001; Ph.D., 2006), Kim has held prestigious fellowships including the Mellon Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (2009-2010) and a Getty-NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship (2012-2013). Her research bridges art history, material culture, and gender studies, with a focus on South and Southeast Asian Buddhist art, sacred objects, and textual-visual intersections.
Her publications include Receptacle of the Sacred (2013) and Garland of Visions (2021), alongside a forthcoming monograph on Devi manuscripts and gender. She directs the MAPPING COLOR IN HISTORY digital humanities project, creating open-access pigment databases. Recent exhibitions curated include Water Stories (2023), addressing climate change through art, and the NEH-funded Dharma and Puṇya (2019).
Kim’s research emphasizes gendered artistic production, postcolonial discourse, and cross-cultural exchanges. She co-edited the exhibition catalog Dharma and Puṇya: Buddhist Ritual Art of Nepal (2019) and actively collaborates across disciplines, integrating conservation science and digital humanities into art historical inquiry.
