Diva Gujral
Diva Gujral is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Ruskin School of Art and an Extraordinary Junior Research Fellow in the History of Art at the Queen’s College, Oxford.
Her research, sitting at the intersection of History, South Asian Studies, and the History of Art, places visual culture in modern and contemporary India in conversation with the country’s changing political landscape. Her book project, “Many Modernisms: Photography, film, nation and identity in non-aligned India (1950-75),” draws on her doctoral research. The project examines practices of photography and film-making that developed in India in the first few decades of its independence, exploring the relationship between these varied modernist vocabularies and India’s policy of non-alignment. The argues for Indian visual culture as a site in which conflicting Cold War ideologies were received but also produced and critiqued. It is one of the first book-length explorations of Indian photography in the 1950s and 1960s, and is an early effort towards understanding the cultural Cold war in India. Her postdoctoral project, entitled “The Persistence of Modernism: Art, Nationalism and India’s History Wars” connects contemporary art and filmmaking to its historical roots in the early Indian postcolonial state. The project explores how Indian contemporary art has become a critical site of history-writing, as new archive-based practices are mediating the legacies of Indian state modernism and the ways that the early postcolonial state is memorialised. As a related ambition, the project offers new methodological interventions into global history and art history, interrogating the relationship between the omissions of modernism and the rise of traditionalism and anti-liberal populism the world over.
Diva completed her BA in History at Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, and her MA and PhD in the History of Art at University College London. Previously, she was a Fellow in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and has also held teaching positions at the Open University and UCL. A committed pedagogue, she has developed and taught a wide range of courses, covering themes such as Indian state and aesthetic modernism, the visual legacies of imperialism in modern and contemporary art in South Asia, the history of media and technologies, and global art history.
Diva’s writing thus far includes the co-authored volume Photography in India: A Visual History from the 1850s to the Present (Prestel Verlag, 2019); essays for exhibition catalogues at the Barbican in London (2024), the Musée du Quai-Branly in Paris (2023), the Museum of Art and Photography in Bengaluru (2022) and Tate Modern in London (forthcoming). Her academic writing has been published in Oxford Art Journal, Object and Routledge (forthcoming). She has also written for magazines and online publications such as Aperture, Frieze, Scroll and Source Photographic Review.
Email: diva.gujral@rsa.ox.ac.uk
