Dr Vivek Gupta

Vivek Gupta is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL (2023-26) where he focuses on the art and architecture of medieval and early modern South Asia and the broader Islamic and Indian Ocean worlds. From 2020 to 2023, he served as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Cambridge, where he continues to co-direct Hindustani Airs: Music, Pleasure, and Cultural Exchange in Courtly Lucknow with Senior Curator, Dr Suzanne Reynolds, at the Fitzwilliam Museum. His first book, Worldshaping Wonders, is under contract, and his second project on the fifteenth-century Deccan is in progress.

Vivek is also committed to public humanities and cross-disciplinary collaboration. From 2020 to 2024, he collaborated with organizations in India to produce the webinar, From Konkan to Coromandel: Cultures and Societies of the Deccan World. He regularly contributes to The Art Newspaper on the status of heritage in South Asia. His several articles on the British Library’s Asian and African Studies blog have made his work on Indo-Islamic manuscripts available to global audiences. Other recent public-facing scholarship has reframed the concept of wonder for Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online.

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. He was awarded an MA from Columbia University (2016) where he studied premodern Hindi and Persian. 

Research

Vivek’s first book, Worldshaping Wonders: Books and Visual Knowledge in Hindustan, is under contract and argues that the experience of wonder was central to shaping, educating, and transforming worlds in Hindustan. Leading up to this book, he has honed an analytical language for the study of Indo-Islamic manuscripts by exploring concepts such as manuscript genre, transcreation, and connected book histories.

His second project, Manuscript as Monument, focuses on scribes, illuminators, and architectural design in the Deccan and transregional fifteenth century. Recent work on this project include contributions to Marg’s landmark publication of The Chandayan and Calligraphies en caractères arabes dans les zones frontières du monde islamique (CallFront).

Specialisms
Transculturation, Global, Premodern

Selected Publications

• “How Persianate Is It? A World-Making Book Transcreated from Iraq to India,” Persian Cultures of Power and the Entanglement of the Afro-Eurasian World, ed. Matthew P. Canepa, 238–256, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2024.
• “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. 
• “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. 
• “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.

Full publications list on UCL Profiles.

Teaching and Supervision

At UCL, Vivek is teaching Curating Mughal South Asia, a course designed to overlap with The Great Mughals exhibition at the V&A and to involve students in Hindustani Airs at the Fitzwilliam Museum.

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.