Rate My Professor Mira Waits

Waits is an art and architectural historian specializing in modern and contemporary South Asia. Her research addresses the development of fingerprinting and the spatial and visual cultures of British colonial carceral and policing systems in India. She is the author of Colonial Carcerality: A Spatial History of the British Colonial Prison in India, scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press in 2026. This project has been supported by an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, which provided research leave in Spring 2021; an Author Grant (Large) from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to cover image reproduction and licensing costs; and the Fulbright Scholar Program for a residency at Trinity College Dublin focused on architectural history from September 2024 to January 2025. Additional funding has come from the University of California. In 2025, Waits was elected Secretary of the Society of Architectural Historians, reflecting her leadership in the field. Her teaching encompasses Islamic, East Asian, and South Asian art history, as well as courses on the built environment and power, colonialism, carcerality, and the visual cultures of democracy.