Sara Mondini is an art historian specialising in the artistic productions—both ancient and modern, as well as contemporary—of South Asia and the SWANA region (South West Asia and North Africa). She is Assistant Professor of Art and Architecture of West and South Asia in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University.
Her research engages broadly with visual and material culture, with a particular focus on Indo-Islamic, Indian, and Islamic art and architecture. She is especially interested in questions of patronage, the circulation and transformation of artistic models, and the socio-political dynamics shaping artistic production and reception across time. Her work also explores how built environments are reinterpreted over centuries, and how shared and contested sacred spaces are constructed, negotiated, and understood. Her work adopts an interdisciplinary approach, bridging art history, anthropology, and visual studies, and combines archival research with fieldwork-based methodologies, with particular attention to postcolonial and transregional perspectives.
She is currently the Principal Investigator of the five-year project The Mosques of Kerala: Artistic Vocabularies in the Identity-Building of Muslim Communities (2023–2028), funded by the FWO through an Odysseus Type II grant.
Before joining Ghent University, she held teaching positions at several institutions, including Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (2009–2023), the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano (2016–2023), the University of Urbino “Carlo Bo” (2022–2023), and the University of Granada (2010–2013), where she taught courses on South Asian visual culture and Islamic art and architecture.
She obtained her PhD in Oriental Studies (Art and Architecture) from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in 2009, after completing her studies in Oriental Languages and Civilisations (Arts and Archaeology).
