Molly Emma Aitken is a specialist in Asian art history, in particular the arts of South Asia. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2001 with a concentration on the art of South Asia. She has curated traveling exhibitions on South Asian jewelry and contemporary folk quilts, and has published numerous articles on Mughal and Rajput painting. Aitken received CAA's Charles Rufus Morey book award in 2011 and the AAS Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2012 for her book The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Currently focused on the late 16th and early 17th centuries, she is looking at Mughal receptions of Rajput court arts in the context of social pleasure.