Vivek Gupta is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London where he researches connected book histories across South, Central, and West Asia (ca. 1100—present). From 2020-23, he served as Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Cambridge, where he continues to work on a research and exhibition project.
Gupta’s first monograph, Worldshaping Wonders: Books and Visual Knowledge in Hindustan, is under contract with Oxford University Press in the British Academy Monographs Series. This book argues that the experience of wonder was central to shaping, educating, and transforming worlds in Hindustan.
Currently, he co-directs a research and exhibition project at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Hindustani Airs: Music, Pleasure, and Cultural Exchange in Lucknow with Senior Curator, Dr Suzanne Reynolds. This will culminate in a co-edited publication and exhibition display. At Jesus College’s West Court Gallery, Gupta curated Shahzia Sikander: Unbound, which features an outdoor sculptural installation and new paintings in response to the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Since 2020, Gupta has collaborated with several nonprofits in India to produce the international 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.
Gupta’s educational and professional background spans the US, UK, India, and Egypt. From June to November 2019, he held a research placement at the British Library on illumination in Persian manuscripts. He was Assistant Curator/Fellow for Islamic and South Asian Coins (2016-17) at the American Numismatic Society in New York. In 2017, he curated the numismatic section for the National Museum of Qatar's inauguration. He has been working on Deccan art since 2012-13 when he served as a research assistant in Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the exhibition, Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700. In 2014, he had a Smithsonian Fellowship at the National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, DC, to work on the Freer Ramayana as well as the Hindi poetry and manuscripts of 'Abd al-Rahim Khan-i Khanan.
Prior to his PhD, Gupta 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 Modern Arabic Literature under the supervision of Professor Mohamed Salah Omri (Oxford), and an MA in South Asian Studies and Comparative Literature (Hindi/Persian) at Columbia University (2016).