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Phillip Wagoner

Professor of Art HistoryShow Bio and Photo

Professor of Art History
41 Wyllys Avenue 311
860-685-3779

Chair, Archaeology Program
860-685-3779

Professor, Archaeology Program
860-685-3779

pwagoner@wesleyan.edu

BA Kenyon College
PHD University of Wisconsin

Fall 2013

ARHA181 - 01
Mughal India:Intro Art History

ARHA286 - 01
Empire And Erotica

Spring 2014

ARHA290 - 01
Epic and Indian Visual Culture

ARHA383 - 01
Monument, Site, and Memory

Office Hours:

Most days and times available by appointment, 41 Wyllys Avenue, Room 311

Research Interests:

Phillip B. Wagoner's research focuses on the cultural history of the Deccan region of South India, primarily in the late medieval and early modern periods (1200-1600). His primary interest is in the historical interactions between the region's established Indic culture and the Persianate culture that arrived when the Delhi Sultanate annexed the region in the early fourteenth century. To study the dynamics of this process, he relies on a broad range of literary, epigraphic, architectural, and archaeological evidence, gathered over the course of numerous trips to the field since the early 1980s. Since 1987, he has been associated with the Vijayanagara Research Project, an international team of scholars in different disciplines dedicated to documentation and interpretation of the site of Vijayanagara, capital of the state that dominated the southern part of the Indian peninsula between the 1340s and 1565. This work has led to the publication of two books; one on late sixteenth-century understandings of Vijayanagara based on a Telugu historiographic text written in the region some 35 years after the collapse of the state (Tidings of the King: a Translation and Ethnohistorical Analysis of the Rayavacakamu, University of Hawai'i Press, 1993), and the other a 3-volume work presenting comprehensive architectural documentation of the over 400 temples and other structures preserved in one key zone of the site (co-authored with George Michell,Vijayanagara: Architectural Inventory of the Sacred Centre, New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies and Manohar, 2001). He has also published numerous articles on various topics relating to Vijayanagara, including the pre-Vijayanagara history of the site, the reuse of architectural components retrieved from earlier buildings, the system of elite dress at the Vijayanagara court, the ability of political elites to move between the Indic and Persianate worlds, and the significance of Sanskrit historiographic traditions that represent Vijayanagara as a successor state to the Delhi Sultanate. Since 2000, his work has increasingly focused on Persianate Islamic architecture in the Deccan, and his articles have dealt with topics ranging from the first appearance of Sultanate style architecture in the region in the early fourteenth century, to the founding and design of Hyderabad, laid out as a new capital by the Qutb Shahi sultans in the late 16th century. He is currently completing a book, co-authored with historian Richard M. Eaton, titled Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India's Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600.

Scholarly Keywords:

South Asian and Islamic art history, South Indian cultural history, buildings archaeology and urbanism, Telugu language and literature

Kate Birney

Assistant Professor of Classical StudiesShow Bio and Photo

Douglas Charles

Professor of AnthropologyShow Bio and Photo

Professor of Anthropology
Anthropology 21
860-685-3266

Professor, Archaeology Program
Exley Science Center 301
860-685-3266

Chair, Anthropology
Anthropology 21
860-685-3266

Director of Collections, Archaeology Program
Exley Science Center 301
860-685-3266

dcharles@wesleyan.edu

BA University of Chicago
MA Northwestern University
PHD Northwestern University

Fall 2013

ANTH202 - 01
Paleoanthropology

ANTH372 - 01
Archaeology Of Death

Spring 2014

ANTH268 - 01
Prehistory of North America

ANTH349 - 01
The Human Skeleton

Office Hours:

By appointment (via email)

Research Interests:

My primary research interest is in understanding the complexity of the political economies of foraging/gardening societies, with a focus on pre-Columbian Eastern North American, particularly the Mississippi River drainage of the Eastern Woodlands. An early interest in the Archaic period (ca. 6000-ca. 3000 bp) has given way to a concentration on Middle Woodland "Hopewellian" cultures (ca. 2050-ca. 1550 bp). Much of our knowledge of social and political life in this period comes from the analysis of mounds and linear earthworks concentrated at "ceremonial" gathering sites, which create a landscape of communities (consisting of shifting networks of differing size and composition) and which were an integral part of the complex social world of a population otherwise dispersed in small hamlets. A complete political economy of Middle Woodland societies requires investigation of the hamlets as well, and I am currently analyzing the material recovered during the ca. 1980 Smiling Dan site CRM excavation by the Center for American Archeology. I am also interested in the history and theory of archaeology and how we construct archaeological knowledge. A set of secondary interests--human evolution and skeletal biology--stems from my concentration on biological anthropology in graduate school. My first academic appointment was as lecturer in the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy in the Medical School at Northwestern University. Following that, and before coming to Wesleyan, I was the Leverhulme Visiting Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Prehistory at the University of Sheffield, where I taught courses on mortuary archaeology and paleopathology.

Publications:
http://works.bepress.com/douglas_k_charles/

Sarah Croucher

Assistant Professor of AnthropologyShow Bio and Photo

Clark Maines

Kenan Professor of the HumanitShow Bio and Photo

Christopher Parslow

Professor of Classical StudiesShow Bio