Tapati Guha-Thakurta

Tapati Guha-Thakurta 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. Guha-Thakurta was married to historian Hari Vasudevan, who died in May 2020 after contracting the COVID-19 virus.

Career

In 1995, she was awarded the Charles Wallace Visiting Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge. In 2011, she was a visiting fellow at the Yale Center for British Art.
In 2018, she was a visiting professor at Brown University. She has written exhibition monographs and curated many art exhibitions. 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.