Dr Vivek Gupta

Research

Vivek Gupta’s research lies at the intersection of Islamic and South Asian visual culture and literature. His fields of philological expertise are Arabic, the nonmodern Urdu-Hindi vernaculars, and Persian. His publications frequently include original translations of inscriptions, poetry, and manuscript evidence. His work covers a range of topics including affect and experience, transculturation, the ludic arts, multilingualism, concepts of the vernacular, intermediality, intersections between art and science, and the cultures of the Indian Ocean. 

Vivek’s first book, Worldshaping Wonders: Manuscripts and Experience in Hindustan, will be based on his 2020 PhD thesis. This book argues that the experience of wonder was central to shaping, educating, and transforming worlds in Hindustan. His second project, Manuscript as Monument: Inscribing Orality in Muslim South Asia (ca. 1300—1550), is the primary subject of his work at UCL. This study focuses on a calligraphic practice indigenous to India known as Bihari and its relationship to performance in devotional spaces.

Currently, he co-directs a research and exhibition project at the Fitzwilliam Museum, with Senior Curator, Dr Suzanne Reynolds, Hindustani Airs: Music, Pleasure, and Cultural Exchange in Lucknow, which will culminate in a co-edited book and exhibition display. At Jesus College’s West Court Gallery, Vivek curated Shahzia Sikander: Unbound, which featured an outdoor sculptural installation and new paintings in response to the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum. 

Since 2020, Vivek has collaborated with several nonprofits in India to produce the webinar, From Konkan to Coromandel: Cultures and Societies of the Deccan World. The focus of this scholarly engagement has been to make new research on the Deccan freely available to a global public. It seeks to bring together research on both the Northern and Southern Deccan regions of India cutting across Hindu, Muslim, Jain, and Buddhist material cultures.

Selected Publications

Essays

“Routes of Translation: Connected Book Histories and al-Jazari’s Robotic Wonders from the Mamluks to Mandu,” South Asian Studies 39 no. 2 (2023): 207–228.

“How Persianate Is It? A World-Making Book Transcreated from Iraq to India,” in Persian Cultures of Power and the Entanglement of the Afro-Eurasian World, ed. Matthew P. Canepa, 238-56, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2024. 

“Inscribing Orality: Calligraphy, Layout, and the Vernacular Anxieties of the Chandayan Manuscripts,” in Chandayan: The Sacred and Profane in Sufism, ed. Richard Cohen, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2024.

“Images for Instruction: A Multilingual Illustrated Dictionary in Fifteenth-Century Sultanate India,” Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World 38 (2021): 77–112. 

“Arabic in Hindustan: Comparative Poetics in the Eighteenth Century and Azad Bilgrami’s The Coral Rosary,” Journal of South Asian Intellectual History 4 no. 2 (2021): 181–222.

“Contemporary Appropriations of the Illustrated Manuscript: Shahzia Sikander’s Disruption as Rapture,” in Intersections: Art and Islamic Cosmopolitanism, ed. Melia Belli Bose, 173–204, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2021. 

“Remapping the World in a Fifteenth-Century Cosmography: Genres and Networks between Deccan India and Iran,” Indo-Persian Manuscripts, ed. A.C.S. Peacock, special issue of Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 59 no. 2 (2021): 151–168.

“Splendour of the City, Nagarshobha: Textile Culture of Mughal Burhanpur,” in Reflections on Mughal Art and Culture, 229–53, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2020.

“Interpreting the Eye (‘ain): Poetry and Painting in the Shrine of Aḥmad Shāh al-Walī al-Bahmanī (r. 1422—1436),” Archives of Asian Art 67 no. 2 (2017): 189–208.

“Unfinished Hyperboles! Adam’s Footprint in Sri Lanka and Wonder amidst Colonial Modernity,” in Iran and Persianate Culture of the Indian Ocean World, ed. A.C.S. Peacock, London: Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris, accepted and in production.

“Book Culture of Sultanate South Asia: Genres, Regions, Scribal Practices, and Vernaculars,” The Oxford Handbook of the Mughal World, ed. Richard M. Eaton and Ramya Sreenivasan, New York: Oxford University Press, accepted and expected 2024.

Book Reviews

The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis by Emma J. Flatt, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, May 17, 2021.

Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century India: Poetry and Paintings from Kishangarh by Heidi Pauwels, caa.reviews, November 29, 2017. 

Exhibition Catalog

Shahzia Sikander: Unbound. Cambridge: HRH Prince Alwaleed Centre for Islamic Studies, 2021.
 
Entries

“Mount Qaf and the Angel,” co-written with Ursula Sims-Williams, in Alexander the Great: The Making of a Myth, ed. Richard Stoneman, London: The British Library, 2022, p. 235. 

“The Mouse and the Cat (Mush u Gurbih) by ‘Ubayd Zakani (1319–70)” in Masterpieces at the Jaipur City Palace Museum, eds. Giles Tillotson and Mrinalini Venkateswaran, 2022, pp. 78–81.

“Ghulām ‘Alī “Āzād” Bilgrāmī,” and “ ‘Abd al-Qādir Badā'ūnī” in Encyclopedia of Indian Religions, eds. Arvind Sharma et al. 2018.

Select Public Writing

“Destruction of living history squanders the future,” The Art Newspaper No. 356 (May 2023): 5. Featured on the “Experts” page.

“How partition divided a centuries-old manuscript between India and Pakistan,” The Art Newspaper, August 12, 2022, co-authored with Aparna Kumar.

Entries on the British Library Asian and African Studies Blog

“Toys and ephemera in a fifteenth-century multilingual illustrated dictionary from India,” July 8, 2020. 

“Naskhi-divani: a little-recognized sultanate script,” June 24, 2019.
 

Teaching and Supervision

Vivek enjoys teaching courses on Islamic art and architecture, South Asian art and architecture, the Indian Ocean world, manuscript studies, transculturation and mobility, world-making objects, and theory and method. As an expert on manuscripts, he loves to take on challenging texts in Arabic, Persian, or Urdu-Hindi with small groups of students, and frequently includes his own translations on course syllabi. 

From 2020 to 2023 Vivek was the primary instructor for the following courses at University of Cambridge, shared between the History of Art and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies departments:

Timurids to Eco Futurism: Indian Ocean in Focus (Spring 2023, one semester, undergrad/grad)

Islamic Art and Architecture: Routes, Roots, and New Frontiers [Autumn 2021-Spring 2022, two semesters, undergrad (Term 1: Prophet to Mongols, Term 2: Mongols to Modernism)]

For Cambridge’s curricula in History of Art and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Vivek has offered lectures on a variety of subjects in team-taught courses including: Timurid, Mughal, Deccan and Rajput history and visual culture, Islamic manuscripts, Indian painting, urbanism, numismatics, textiles, and objects in the collections of the University Library and Fitzwilliam Museum. 

He has supervised undergraduate theses on a range of topics, most recently on “Locating the Body between Architecture and Diagram: The Function of Talismans in Indo-Islamicate Manuscripts (ca. 1550-1700),” and “Cultural Encounters between English and Mughal Empires.” He frequently guides graduate students based in the US, UK, and India working on Islamicate South Asia and manuscript studies.
 

Biography

Vivek Gupta is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL where he researches connected book histories across South, Central, and West Asia (ca. 1100—present). From 2020 to 2023, he served as Postdoctoral Associate at University of Cambridge, where he continues to co-direct a research and exhibition project at the Fitzwilliam Museum. His first book, Worldshaping Wonders: Manuscripts and Experience in Hindustan, will be based on his 2020 PhD thesis. And, his second project, Manuscript as Monument: Inscribing Orality in Muslim South Asia (ca. 1300—1550), is the primary subject of his current fellowship.

Vivek’s crash course in working with objects was when he had the privilege of serving as a Research Assistant in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Islamic Art for the exhibition Sultans of Deccan India, 1500—1700 (2015), shortly after which he was named a Smithsonian Fellow at the National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, DC. Since then, he has worked in a variety of collections and archives across the world, and his expertise has often won him research consulting stints. Still, his favorite place of study remains the British Library, where he is frequently found. 

In collaboration with his students, Vivek recently curated Shahzia Sikander: Unbound at Jesus College, Cambridge (2021-22), which focused on themes of historical painting practices, transnational feminism, and decolonization. He installed a public sculpture, Sikander’s Promiscuous Intimacies (2020), outdoors for the first time at Jesus College and had the artist create original works in response to Cambridge’s archives. Hindustani Airs: Music, Pleasure, and Cultural Exchange in Courtly Lucknow, currently in planning at the Fitzwilliam Museum with Senior Curator, Dr Suzanne Reynolds, will reanimate the performance milieus of musicians, poets, and dancers through a multilingual songbook (Urdu, Braj, Panjabi, Persian) made for an Englishwoman.

Prior to his PhD in History of Art at SOAS, University of London (2020), Vivek earned a BA in Arabic and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis (2010) during which and after he lived in Egypt and worked on Arabic Literature under the supervision of Professor Mohamed Salah Omri (Oxford). He was awarded an MA in Comparative Literature (Persian/Hindi) from Columbia University (2016).
 
Vivek loves difficult languages, research, writing, curating exhibitions, and working with objects. When not in a library, he is often found by the sea somewhere in Goa or Greece.