Seminar | Entangled Worlds: Intercultural Encounters and Knowledge Exchange in the Indian Subcontinent | 18 February 2026 | XCHR
Rinald D'Souza
Entangled Worlds: Intercultural Encounters and Knowledge Exchange in the Indian SubcontinentWednesday, 18 February 2026 | 4 pm
SEMINAREntangled Worlds: |
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Entangled Worlds:
Intercultural Encounters and Knowledge Exchange in the Indian Subcontinent
This symposium examines the Indian subcontinent as a key site of intercultural encounter and knowledge exchange from antiquity to the early modern period, with particular attention to artistic, intellectual and religious interactions across the Indian Ocean world. Through case studies situated in Portuguese India, Mughal imperial culture and the Christian Ethiopian Empire, the symposium challenges linear and centre–periphery models of cultural transmission. Instead, it foregrounds the entangled processes through which cultural forms, ideas, and practices were shaped by sustained contact, negotiation and mutual transformation.
Drawing on material, visual and textual sources, the symposium explores how artistic production and intellectual activity emerged within shared spaces of collaboration involving missionaries, imperial courts, itinerant artists, translators, and local agents. It considers the circulation of objects, images and texts as part of wider and historically situated networks of exchange that linked South Asia with Africa, Europe and the wider Indian Ocean world. Particular attention is given to practices of emulation, adaptation and translation, through which devotional imagery, iconographic traditions and ethical and philosophical vocabularies were reworked across linguistic, religious and cultural boundaries.
Taken together, the papers present the Indian subcontinent not merely as a recipient of external influences, but as an active and generative arena in which intercultural encounters produced new artistic forms and hybrid intellectual traditions. By emphasising entanglement, shared agency and the co-production of knowledge, the symposium contributes to wider debates in global history, art history and intellectual history on connected histories and the making of meaning across cultures.
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Francesco Gusella
Francesco Gusella is a historian of South Asian art with a focus on Portuguese India during the early modern period. He earned his PhD in 2019 at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome, with a thesis on Christian devotional ivories from Portuguese colonial India. He conducted extensive research in archives, museums, research centres and private collections in Portugal, Italy, Germany and India by publishing on several art traditions, including metalworks, textiles, carvings, painting and architecture. From 2025, he is postdoctoral researcher and member of the Institute for the Study of the Christian Orient at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” where he teaches history of the missions through an art historical perspective. He is the author of the upcoming book: The Good Shepherd Rockery from Portuguese India, 1570s to 1650s: Emulation and Dissimulation in a case of Missionary Art (New York: Routledge, 2026).
Haila Manteghi
Haila Manteghi is a researcher at the Institute for Mission Studies at the University of Münster, Germany. She holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Alicante, Spain, and a PhD in Classics from the University of Exeter, UK. From 2019 to 2022, she was a member of the Religion and Politics Cluster of Excellence at the University of Münster, where she led the project on “Dynamics of Intercultural Traditioning”: Criticism of Religion and Apologetics in Shifting Interreligious Contexts: Jerome Xavier’s Ayena-ye haqq-nama in Mughal India and Safavid Persia. Her areas of interest include missionary activities in Persia and India during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Carolin Schäfer
Carolin Schäfer is a PhD candidate in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany and the University of Toronto, Canada. Her dissertation project with the title ‘Sacred Images from Ethiopia. Intercultural Workshops and the Cooperation of artists from Ethiopia, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean’ focuses on the collection of Ethiopian icons in the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich and was submitted on 15th January 2026. In addition to creating the first coherent catalogue of the collection, she aims to gain a better understanding of the intercultural exchanges and expressions within the medium, and to analyse their development by including other collections such as that of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her previous academic work has focused on the murals of the Yəmrəḥannä Krəstos Church in the Lasta Mountains of Ethiopia, and Lalibäla as an expression of the Ethiopian Church's understanding of Jerusalem. She holds degrees in Art History (M.A., B.A.) and Archaeology (B.A.). For TEM, she is recording pastedowns among the many Ethiopian manuscripts in Germany.
R. Benedito Ferrão
R. Benedito Ferrão is an Associate Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Mellon, Endeavour, and Rotary programs, the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. Apart from being an academic, he is also a curator who has worked with the artists Karishma D’Souza, Angela Ferrão, and Vamona Navelcar. His 2017-18 exhibition Goa, Portugal, Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar, also the title of his edited book, would be the last time the artist’s work would be seen publicly before his demise in 2021. Additionally, he has written for Research in African Literatures, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Studies in Travel Writing, and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication among other journals; he is also a regular contributor to Scroll.in, one of India’s most widely read journalistic platforms. William & Mary awarded Dr. Ferrão their Jinlan Liu Prize for APIA research for 2024-27 and named him University Professor for Teaching Excellence for 2025-28.
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