It is a particular pleasure to celebrate Moizza Elahi’s successful completion of the Final Oral Examination held on June 15th 2026. The Department of Art History extends heartfelt congratulations while recognizing the intellectual ambition, dedication, and care that brought this project to completion.
Moizza’s dissertation, “Rethinking Representation: Art, Materiality, and Gender in Gandhara,” is an impressive interdisciplinary undertaking that decisively reorients the field of Gandharan art. It diverts our gaze from the long-dominant stylistic frameworks that have treated Gandhara primarily as a Classically indebted Buddhist artistic tradition, and recontextualizes it instead as a locally embedded, socially entangled, and materially active visual culture. Focusing on an extensive body of systematically excavated material from monastic sites in the Swat Valley, Pakistan, the project brings stone sculpture, architectural elements, relief panels, donors, devotees, inscriptions, and archaeological contexts into a richly textured account of Buddhist practice. Through the lenses of materiality and gender, Moizza shows how Gandharan images did not merely represent religious life, but actively shaped embodied experience, social categories, ritual practices, and the very terms through which this artistic tradition can be rethought. As a regular member of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Swat and a graduate of our Mediterranean Archaeology Collaborative Specialization program, Moizza will continue to pursue research that moves fluidly between archaeological fieldwork, theoretical inquiry, and textual and epigraphic analysis.
Moizza’s PhD advisor SeungJung Kim and committee member Bjoern Ewald extend their gratitude to Dr. Pia Brancaccio (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”) for her extensive advisory role and Dr. Luca Olivieri (Dir. ISMEO) for his guidance in Swat. We also thank the examiners, Dr. Sarah Richardson (University of Toronto Mississauga) and Dr. Chandreyi Basu (St. Lawrence University), for their careful and generous engagement with the dissertation.
Moizza will begin the prestigious two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University in August 2026 with a concurrent position as Visiting Lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Elahi and wishing her every success in this exciting next chapter of her scholarly career.