Mrinalini Mitra
Matric Year: 2021 – Subject: MSc Modern South Asian Studies – Scholarship: Indira Gandhi-Radhakrishnan Scholar
Mrinalini is passionate about art history, visual culture, and urban architecture. During her time at Oxford, she proposes to study the role of Mughal gardens as landscapes and settings in miniature paintings. More specifically, she is interested in examining Mughal gardens as places of production and storing wealth and not merely aesthetic environments.
Mrinalini graduated from Denison University with honours (Magna Cum Laude) and as a Phi Beta Kappa member in 2020. As a Classicist, she has spent hours tracing the cultural consciousness of ancient communities by studying their art, architecture and philosophy; exploring the processes of identification and reification that produce the imagined landscape of cities (such as Athens and Rome) as locations of culture, history, and memory of communities. The interdisciplinary nature of her liberal arts education allowed her to undertake summer-long research as a Woodyard Scholar in the city of Ayodhya in India, which sparked her interest in urban architecture in South Asia.
Mrinalini is also a recipient of the Davis Projects for Peace Prize and runs her non-profit organisation, Panthalassa that works in women healthcare, education, and sustainable energy alternatives.