Michael Meister

Michael W. Meister (BA, MA, PhD Harvard) is W. Norman Brown Professor of South Asia Studies. He is a specialist in the art of India and Pakistan. He has served as Chair of the Departments of South Asia Studies (SASt) and History of Art and as Director of Penn's South Asia Center. He is Curator of Indian Art, Asian section, University Museum, and Curator of the South Asia Art Archive. Research fellowships have included two Fulbright awards, a J. Paul Getty Trust Interpretive Research award, an NEH grant, American Institute of Indian Studies and American Institute of Pakistan Studies grants, and funding from University Research Foundations at Penn and Univ. Texas-Austin. His research and writing focuses on temple architecture, the morphology of meaning, and other aspects of the art of the Indian sub-continent. Current projects include "Mountain Temples and Temple-Mountains" for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and a monograph growing out of his long-term "Salt Range Temples" project.