Tapati Guha Thakurta

Biography

A student of history at Presidency College, Calcutta and Calcutta University, she did her D.Phil. from the History Faculty, University of Oxford. Her work is located within the disciplinary fields of cultural history, history of art and visual studies. She has written widely and taught courses on the following themes: art, nationalism and modernity; the institutional practices and political locations of art history and archaeology; the careers of monuments and museum objects; and popular urban visual culture of modern and contemporary India. Her three main books are The Making of a New 'Indian' Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Columbia University Press, and Permanent Black, 2004), and In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (Delhi: Primus Books, 2015). She has also authored exhibition monographs and has co-edited two anthologies of essays – Theorising the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee (Delhi: OUP, 2011) and New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices (Delhi: OUP, 2013).

Research Interest

History