Dr Fiona Buckee

Dr Buckee studied Philosophy (BA) and Comparative Religion (MA) at Manchester University, and Asian Art at the British Museum (PgDip). She completed her PhD in Indian Temple Architecture in 2010 at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. She has taught South Asian Art and Architecture at The British Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum and Sotheby’s Institute since 2004, and from 2007 has been a regular tutor of the Indian Art Module of SOAS Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art. In 2010/11 she was a Senior Teaching Fellow in South Asian Art at SOAS, teaching BA and MA courses. In 2011 she was made a Research Associate for the Art and Archaeology Department. Dr Buckee is an Associate Editor for the journal South Asian Studies, one of the two academic journals of the British Association for South Asian Studies. She is also a Trustee of KINOE, (Kids in Need of Education), a UK registered charity that works to educate disadvantaged children in India and Nepal.

Dr Buckee’s main area of research is the design and formalistic development of Indian temple architecture. She has conducted extensive fieldwork across North India, her studies focussing on the origination, evolution and transformation of North Indian temple architecture from 500 – 1100, looking in particular at the design of Latina temples, a nagara temple type with a curved spire. Her work has explored how closely instructions relating to Latina temple spires from the Vastushastras (Indian texts detailing the ‘rules’ of Indian architecture) correlate to the shapes and proportions of the surviving temple towers. She has also undertaken fieldwork in Tamil Nadu, researching the emergence and proliferation of subsidiary architecture in Tamil temple complexes.

She is currently working on an analysis of the original design of the ruined Mundeshwari Temple in Ramgarh in Bihar based on a study of its surviving fragments and related temple architecture. This project builds upon her PhD, in which she reconstructed through drawings the ruined spire of Temple 45 at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh. In addition, she is researching a book about Indian temple architecture, sculpture and regional geology that she will co-author with geologist Dr Clare Buckee.