Department of Art

Mira Rai Waits is an Associate Professor at Appalachian State University. She is the author of Colonial Carcerality: A Spatial History of the British Colonial Prison in India (Oxford University Press, 2026). Her scholarship has addressed the development of fingerprinting and the spatial and visual cultures of British colonial carceral and policing systems in India. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Scholar Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Her teaching covers a global range, including Islamic, East Asian, and South Asian art history, with a specific focus on the built environment and power through courses on the city, colonialism, carcerality, and the visual cultures of democracy. She is the current Secretary for the Society of Architectural Historians.