Dr. Mira Rai Waits is an art and architectural historian of modern and contemporary South Asia. Her research has addressed the development of fingerprinting in colonial India, the architectural history of British colonial prisons, and the role that remunerative labor played in the production of colonial Indian penology. Her research has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies and University of California President’s Program. She has held postdoctoral fellowships with the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

She is currently working on a book project Colonial Carcerality: The Birth of the Modern Prison in India, which explores the spatial history of British colonial prisons in India. Dr. Waits teaches courses on Asian art and architectural history, Islamic art and architectural history, contemporary South Asian visual culture, and the visual culture of the global city.