Shreya Gupta

I am a final-year doctoral researcher working on an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership at Exeter in collaboration with the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. My PhD project is titled “Decolonising Collections: Uncovering British and Indian collectors’ networks behind British numismatic collections”. It looks at the history of four collections of Indian coins currently held in the Ashmolean Museum, the British Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum. While they are named after four British male coin collectors, we know little about the Indian collectors and scholars who helped them in assembling these collections.

Priot to starting my PhD, I studied History at St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. Subsequently, I earned my MA in South Asian History from SOAS, London in 2020. Through academic endeavours as well as various volunteering experiences, I became interested in museums, especially the role they play in helping the public engage with history. Furthering my interests, I worked in the heritage sector, researching, and writing essays for arts and culture publications as well as curating content for Indian History platforms on social media. In a particularly exciting project, I was part of the Curious Curatorium, a group of students who worked in collaboration with Delhi Art Gallery Museums to curate an online exhibition on the works of Bengali artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya. I believe in making history accessible by bridging the gap between academic and public histories. I hope to pursue this goal by disseminating my research on the history of South Asian collectors and collections through various creative mediums.