Rate My Professor Mira Waits

Mira Waits is an Associate Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of Art at Appalachian State University. She joined the institution in 2016 and also serves as Honors Director and Area Coordinator for Art History in the Art and Visual Culture program. Waits earned her B.A. from the University of Virginia and both her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 2017, in her role as Honors Director, she has mentored numerous honors students, taught honors sections of courses such as Islamic Art History and art history surveys, supervised honors contracts, overseen curriculum changes to broaden access for all Art Department majors, and led field trips including to the Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art in Richmond, Virginia.

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.