Michael W. Meister


Michael W. Meister is an art historian, archaeologist and architectural historian at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the W. Norman Brown Professor in the and South Asia Studies, and has served as chair of the Department of South Asia Studies and as the director of the University of Pennsylvania's South Asia Center. In addition, he is Consulting Curator, Asian Section, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Faculty Curator of the South Asia Art Archive within the Penn Library's South Asia Image Collection.
His research focuses on Hindu temple architecture, the morphology of meaning, and other aspects of the history of art and architecture of the Indian sub-continent. He has authored several hundred essays and edited several books, especially several volumes of the Encyclopædia of Indian Temple Architecture.

Education

Books

His students include several art historians: Katherine Hacker, Ajay Sinha, Darielle Mason, Pika Ghosh, Chandreyi Basu, Tamara Sears, Melissa Kerin, John Henry Rice, Beth Citron, Pushkar Sohoni, Yael R. Rice, and Nachiket Chanchani, author of Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains.