Dr. Mira Rai Waits, Associate Professor of Art History, has published the book Colonial Carcerality: A Spatial History of the British Colonial Prison in India (Oxford University Press, 2026).
Colonial Carcerality examines the vast archive of material related to the space and spatial experience of prisons produced during British colonial rule in India. By bringing official government records of architectural plans, drawings, and photographs into conversation with popular representations ranging from paintings and prints to literature, Waits demonstrates that the colonial Indian prison was not simply a fixed architectural arena where events unfolded. Rather, prison space was contingent upon and held together by shifting narratives and a multitude of actors, including the prisoners themselves. The book offers a means to destabilize the colonial prison as a static historical space by acknowledging the various actors involved in prison production. In tackling this spatial history, Colonial Carcerality makes a larger case for the crucial role that prisons as spatial forms played in constituting the colonial project and the necessity of writing histories that recognize historical space as an unfinished cultural object.
This book has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. At Appalachian, support for this work has come from the Department of Art, the University Research Council, and the College of Fine and Applied Arts.
Dr. Mira Waits
Dr. Mira Waits book cover thumbnail
Dr. Mira Waits book cover thumbnail