Cathleen A. Cummings, Ph.D. is an associate professor of Art History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. Cummings received her doctorate in art history from The Ohio State University, and M.A.s from Ohio State and the University of London. She specializes in South Asian art, particularly in the areas of Hindu temple architecture and Indian miniature painting.

Her book, Decoding a Hindu Temple: Royalty and Religion in the Iconographic Program of the Virupaksha Temple, Pattadakal, was published in 2014 by The South Asian Studies Association. She has also published on Rajput painting and Vajrayana Buddhist art. She has curated exhibitions for the Peabody-Essex Museum in Massachusetts, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at UAB. She is currently researching localized traditions of religious architecture, especially at Nagpur, and female architectural patronage, in the context of India’s Maratha polity in the 18th century.