Vivek Gupta is currently British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London in the Department of History of Art. His first book, Worldshaping Wonders: Books and Visual Knowledge in Hindustan, is under contract with Oxford University Press in the British Academy Monographs Series. His second monograph, Manuscript as Monument, focuses on the relationship between bodies, ritual, calligraphy, and ornament across media in the Bahmani Deccan. His work covers a range of topics including the art of the book, intermediality, embodied experience, transculturation, the ludic arts, intersections between art and science, and the cultures of the Indian Ocean.
At the Fitzwilliam, Vivek is working with Dr Suzanne Reynolds, Senior Curator, on a research and exhibition project, Hindustani Airs. This project focuses on an outstanding late eighteenth-century illustrated songbook made in Lucknow, India, and what it reveals about the performing arts, gender, and empire. He previously worked at the University of Cambridge as Postdoctoral Associate (2020-23) based at the Centre of Islamic Studies and Jesus College. At Cambridge, he taught courses on Islamic and South Asian art and architecture in the departments of History of Art and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He enjoyed teaching with Cambridge’s worldclass collections of manuscripts, paintings, coins, and decorative arts, and he curated Shahzia Sikander: Unbound, at Jesus College (2021-22) with three of his students.
