Alice Casalini

Alice Casalini is an art historian and archaeologist of Central Asia. Her main research interest lies in the Buddhist art and architecture of the first millennium, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of doctrine, practice and the materiality of religion. Beyond Buddhist art, she has also written on Western Chinese rock-cut monasteries, South Asian ceramics, and the early developments of the Hindu Temple in northern Pakistan. Alice completed her doctorate in Art History at the University of Chicago and has a Master's Degree in Chinese Studies from the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She has been a permanent member of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan since 2024. She is currently working on her first monograph, tentatively titled "Buddhist Ways of Seeing: Space, Perception, and Representation in Gandhāra", which reconsiders how religious architecture embodies the complex relationship between reality, representation, and illusion in the Buddhist context of northern Pakistan between the first and fourth century CE. While at Harvard, she will also work on a second project which will investigate the poetics of clay and plaster modeling in the Buddhist art of Central Asia between the third and sixth century CE.