Neelima Jeychandran

Dr. Neelima Jeychandran is an Assistant Professor of African Visual Culture in the Department of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar. Her research focuses on oceanic crossovers and material histories of West/East Africa and western India, emphasizing the entangled histories of the Black Indian Ocean world through material religions, memories, and non-human agency. She co-edited Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (Routledge, 2020) and co-organized the Verge journal issue on "Indian Ocean Studies, African-Asian Affinities" (2022). At VCUarts Qatar, she leads the research lab "Global Asia: Mobilities and Arts."

As a Bayreuth Academy Fellow (Summer 2024), she explores disordered spatial imaginaries of Africa via affective objects and spirited geographies. Her work challenges conventional cartographies by analyzing how communities of African descent in the Indian Ocean reimagine Black histories through materialities and identity-based cartographies.

Key research themes include: Afro-Indian and Afro-Arab materialities; Atlantic and Indian Ocean connections; and the role of built forms and objects in redefining spatial narratives. Current projects focus on how historical exchanges between Africa, Arabia, and Asia produce non-conventional mappings of identity and space.