Tapati Guha-Thakurta (born 1957) is an Indian historian who has written about the cultural history and art of India. She is a director and professor in history at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and was previously a professor at Presidency College, Kolkata. Her extensive research work on Kolkata's Durga Puja led to its inclusion in UNESCOs Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

Biography

Guha-Thakurta was born in Calcutta and obtained a bachelor's and a master's degree in history from the Presidency College and Calcutta University. She finished her DPhil. at the University of Oxford.^[2] Guha-Thakurta was married to historian Hari Vasudevan, who died in May 2020 after contracting the Covid-19 virus.^[3]

Career

In 1995, she was awarded the Charles Wallace Visiting Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge.^[4] In 2011, she was a visiting fellow at the Yale Center for British Art.^[5] In 2018, she was a visiting professor at Brown University.^[6] She has written exhibition monographs and curated many art exhibitions.^[7] In 2019, she was assigned by the Indian Ministry of Culture to prepare a dossier proposing the inclusion of Durga Puja in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.^[8]

Books

• Guha-Thakurta, Tapati (2007). The Making of a New 'Indian' Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850–1920. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521052733.
• Guha-Thakurta, Tapati (2004). Monuments, Objects, Histories: Art in Colonial and Post–Colonial India. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0231129985.
• Guha-Thakurta, Tapati (2015). In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata. Primus Books. ISBN 978-9384082468.

References

External links

• Centre for Studies in Social Sciences – profile
• Brown University – profile
• University of Chicago – profile