Dr. Mohit Manohar, Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in South Asian Art in the Department of Art History and COSAS member has received the UC Berkeley South Asia Art and Architecture Dissertation Prize for his Ph.D. dissertation, “The City of Gods and Fortune: An Architectural and Urban History of Daulatabad, ca. 13th–15th centuries.” The prize is awarded to an outstanding dissertation in South Asian art defended at an accredited university in North America and Europe.

Organized chronologically, the dissertation takes a multifaceted approach to studying Daulatabad’s built environment and includes new photographs, plans, maps, drawings, and translations of epigraphs from the region. By analyzing an important but neglected corpus of architectural and urban spaces from the region, the dissertation demonstrates that Daulatabad is essential to writing an integrated history of medieval South Asia that crosses political, religious, and linguistic lines. Furthermore, the dissertation contributes to the study of South Asian architecture and urbanism by critically engaging with ongoing debates in landscape studies, religious studies, cross-cultural studies, and race and ethnicity studies, and their relationship with the arts.

Manohar was selected for the prize by a committee consisting of colleagues Atreyee Gupta (Chair, University of California, Berkeley), Susan Bean (Independent Scholar + Curator), Monica Juneja (Universität Heidelberg), and Jinah Kim (Harvard University).

Congratulations to Dr. Manohar on this incredible accomplishment.