TU professors receive award for book on British, Indian art

Friday, February 22, 2008

The Historians of British Art (HBA) have awarded their HBA Book Prize for 2007 to two University of Tulsa professors, Hermione de Almeida and George Gilpin, for their book, "Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India."

The prize was announced by the Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History at the annual meeting of the College Art Association in Dallas, Feb. 21–23. de Almeida is the Pauline Walter Chair of English and Comparative Literature and Gilpin is professor of English and McFarlin Library Scholar-in-Residence at TU.

"Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India" was published in London last year by Ashgate Publishing. The book received a publication grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and support from the Yale Center for British Art. It is the first comprehensive examination of British artists, explorers and travelers whose first-hand impressions and prospects of India from 1780–1836 became a stimulus for the Romantic Movement in England and Europe; the book includes 60 color and 180 black and white illustrations.

In accepting the book prize, de Almeida and Gilpin described the award as a fulfilling conclusion to a challenging project.

"The news is especially pleasing to us because our book was a decade or more in the making with the sorts of delays in research access and production that few would have expected to encounter with a single project," Gilpin said. "It remained nevertheless a labor of love."

"We hoped all along that we were setting out the parameters of a scholarly field that would inspire and encourage future scholars from a variety of disciplines," de Almeida said. "We hope that this prize will foster more book projects by other scholars that go beyond prevailing boundaries and inspire interdisciplinary and intercultural speculation."

For information on "Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India," visit www.ashgate.com. For more information about the Department of English at TU, visit

www.cas.utulsa.edu/english.