Radha Dalal

Radha Dalal is an Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture and Director of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. She holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota (2011), alongside MA (2003), B.A. (1999), and B.S. (1999) degrees from the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on visual cultures of mobility and urbanism in the Ottoman Empire, with emphasis on 19th-early 20th century socio-political interactions between Ottoman territories and European/Asian polities.

Her work is supported by grants from the MacArthur Foundation, Kress Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Qatar National Research Fund, and VCU. Current projects include a monograph on the Khilafat Movement and print media in British India and Ottoman Turkey (1919–1924), funded by the VCU Presidential Research Quest Fund. She serves as Vice-President (2021–2023) of the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies, fostering interdisciplinary scholarship on global interconnectedness from 1780–1914.

Research interests span Ottoman visual propaganda, cultural heritage preservation, museum studies, collective memory theories, and histories of photography/urbanism. She has contributed to museum catalogues (e.g., Museum of Islamic Art, Doha) and co-edited volumes on Islamic art mobility. Key publications analyze Ottoman gardens, French photography's Ottoman representations, and transregional art networks.

Funded projects include the QNRF NPRP grant for online global art history resources (2017–2018) and a VCU initiative on Khilafat Movement print media (2017–2020). Academic engagements include invited lectures at the University of London and presentations on Khilafat Movement satire at the Middle East Studies Association conference.