Aatika Singh is a scholar and activist, working across practice, research, and criticism. She is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford & studying at MESAAS in Columbia University as part of the Ivy Plus Exchange. She has a PhD Minor from the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. Aatika is one of the first Dalit women from South Asia to pursue art history in the US and work towards bridging critical scholarship with community activism. She researches the intersection of popular aesthetics, legal regime and spatial history in North India in the modern milieu. Her ongoing doctoral project on iconoclasm analysis the sculptural defacement of anti-caste iconography, its nexus with land ownership and the intervention of photographic archiving.
Aatika's research is generously supported by the Center for South Asia, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Asian American Research Center, RAISE Doctoral Fellowship, and Stanford Humanities Center. She finished her master's in visual studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2022. Singh is passionate about modernity/sm, textile materiality, digital humanities, and labour philosophy. For over a decade, she has lived, created, and protested in New Delhi and lately, San Francisco. Aatika welcomes collaborations in research, writing, and creative projects. Queries about academic mentorship, graduate school, and anti-caste scholarship are welcome.