Divya Kumar-Dumas

Divya Kumar-Dumas is a historian of art, architecture, environments, and landscapes, with a focus on the ancient and medieval worlds of South Asia and the early Indian Ocean. Her work brings a multidisciplinary lens to the study of archaeology, architecture, visuality, and material culture, emphasizing new relationships between text, image, and archaeology. Her research and teaching prioritize environmental histories, transregional exchange, and the poetics of place.

Her current book project, The Frisson of Poetry on a Wall in Lanka, reframes the World Heritage site of Sigiriya through its medieval graffiti—poems inscribed by visitors on a polished wall built along the site’s central rock. By centering these poetic responses, the book reveals a sustained medieval engagement with architecture and vision, contributing to landscape history, reception theory, and heritage studies by challenging conservation frameworks that prioritize origin over use.

A second strand of research examines the circulation of figurines, materials, and architectural forms and practices across the Indian Ocean in the first millennium CE. She is co-editor of Moving ‘Indian’ Images in the First Millennium (Brepols), a volume on Indic objects excavated far from the subcontinent. She also co-directs the Sigiriya Spatial and Landscape Data Collaboration (SSLDC), works on a digital initiative for South Asian maritime epigraphy, and serves as Managing Editor and Digital Strategy Coordinator of the Gardens of the Roman Empire project.

She holds a B.A. in History from Yale University; an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in South Asia Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, where she specialized in the history of art and architecture; and an MPS in Landscape Design from George Washington University, with additional coursework in the MLA program at the University of Maryland. She simultaneously studied dance with the Dhananjayans of Bharata Kalanjali in both the United States and India for thirteen years, and spent a year at Kalakshetra College of Fine Arts in Chennai as a Fulbright Fellow. Through public performance and with support from regional and national institutions like the NEA, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Maryland State Arts Council, and Maryland Historical Trust, she developed a lifelong language-learning practice and advocated for inclusive cultural policies in publicly-funded folk, traditional, and performance arts.

At UMD, Kumar-Dumas teaches courses in world architecture and Asian art that emphasize materiality, impermanence, and global interconnectedness. Her pedagogy centers on comparative frameworks and encourages students to connect historical evidence with present-day questions of power, ecology, and representation.