ABOUT

Anika Sultana is an art historian in the making and a Fast-Track Master’s student at The Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas. She graduated from UTD in May 2025 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual and Performing Arts with an Art History concentration.

With an interest in Islamic and South Asian art history, her research primarily focuses on art and material culture from the Bengal Famine of 1943, an oft-overlooked event in the context of world history. While studying at EODIAH, Anika’s work on the 1943 famine will also explore that of pre-famine, inter-famine, and post-famine cultural memory (particularly among the Bengali people), famine commemoration and memorialization, and the development of “social realism” as observed in art from Bengali artists like Zainul Abedin, Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, and Somnath Hore, whose famine sketches and post-famine works practically served as journalistic documentation of the famine and illustrated the processing of post-famine trauma.

In Spring 2025, under the supervision of Dr. Alibhai, Anika’s undergraduate senior capstone paper analyzed the memorialization and memory of the 1943 famine, juxtaposing it against that of “better-known” historical famines like the Great Irish Hunger of 1845. Her capstone paper essentially asked the question: “Why wasn’t the Bengal Famine of 1943 afforded the same amount of attention as the Great Irish Hunger?” Her capstone paper also surveyed famine and post-famine works from Abedin, Bhattacharya, and Hore, contributing to an overall examination of the Bengali people’s cultural memory, especially within the anchoring context of famine and post-famine trauma.

As part of her praxis, Anika aspires to illuminate the voices of the marginalized and the underrepresented. Through her research at EODIAH and MENARAH, she hopes to mold the field of art history into an inclusive sphere, and seeks to bridge the broader gap between the global historical canon and the 1943 famine by shedding light upon the artists, scholars, and like-minded creatives who put pen to paper while documenting the sights before their eyes.