Research Expertise and Interest

global modern art, modern and contemporary South and Southeast Asian art

Research Description

Atreyee Gupta’s area of expertise is Global Modernism, with a special emphasis on the aesthetic and intellectual flows that have cut across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the twentieth century onwards. Her research and teaching interests cluster around visual and intellectual histories of twentieth-century art; the intersections among the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement, and art after 1945; new media and experimental cinema; and the question of the global as materially, intellectually, and politically constellated around decolonization. Gupta is presently completing Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernism, and the Third World Project, India ca. 1930–1960, a book on the artistic and intellectual resonances of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War era and the interwar anti-colonial Afro-Asian networks that preceded it. Her coedited books include Postwar – A Global Art History, 1945–1965 (with Okwui Enwezor).

Gupta has published essays on postcolonial art, the Cold War, and the Non-Aligned Movement in journals such as Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Yishu, Third Text, among others. Other publications have focused on the methodologies for a global art history (James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? 2006); the myriad histories of the “global” (Artl@s Bulletin, 2017); and the question of translation that emerges therein (28 Magazine, Gaza 2018).

Affiliated with the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, Center for Contemporary India, Center for Race and Gender, Center for Latin American Studies, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, and the Institute for South Asia Studies, Gupta teaches courses on modern and contemporary Asian and Asian American art and architecture, along with thematic seminars on South and Southeast art, art and decolonization, curatorial practice, and global modernisms more broadly. She is the Co-director of the UC Berkeley South Asia Art Initiative at the Institute for South Asia Studies.