Vivek Gupta is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL (2023-26). From 2020 to 2023, he was 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 at the Fitzwilliam Museum. He was most recently selected to be a Resident at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Tashkent (2025).
Vivek’s first book, Wonders of Hindustan: Artists and Books in the Early Modern World, is under contract and argues that the experience of wonder was central to shaping, educating, and transforming worlds in Hindustan. A second project focuses on artists, scribes, illuminators, and architectural design between South and Central Asia. 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).
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.