Dr Diya Gupta
Contact details
Personal links
About
Overview
Educated at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, University of Cambridge and King's College London, Dr Diya Gupta is a literary and cultural historian interested in how visual culture, life-writing and literature respond to war. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Public History at City St George's, University of London, and was formerly Past & Present Fellow: Race, Ethnicity and Equality in History at the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of Historical Research.
Her first book, 'India in the Second World War: An Emotional History' (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2023), recovers and assesses an emotional history of undivided India during the Second World War. Here, alongside colonial photographs, she studies letters, memoirs, political philosophy and literary texts in Bengali and English languages to reveal the complexities of Indian war emotions. The book was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's 2024 Gladstone Prize.
Her current research project examines the nature of wartime violence as it turns inwards, targeting colonised civilian bodies. The project investigates literary and visual representations of food deprivation in colonised India during the Second World War through the lens of the 1943 Bengal Famine. It also assesses whether evocations of past hunger can become new ways of understanding food inequalities in the world today.
Dr Gupta is a public historian. She speaks regularly about her research to audiences at the British Library, Imperial War Museums, art galleries and charities. She has been interviewed on the BBC Asian Network, featured on Channel Five documentaries, and advised on BBC Radio 4 programmes, BBC historical dramas and Second World War computer games. She has also co-convened the 'Teaching Empire and War' workshop series for British schoolchildren.
UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING (2025/2026)
IP2068 The Making of Modern South Asia
IP2062 Making History Public
BA dissertation supervision
MA TEACHING (2025/2026)
Dissertation supervision
PHD SUPERVISION (2024-2028)
Co-supervisor with the Imperial War Museums on AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership project 'Visualising India’s Wars in South-East Asia, 1938-1947'
GRANTS
2024 AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership award to supervise a PhD student with the Imperial War Museums
2023 HEIF Knowledge Exchange grant from City for the project 'Witness: Why are we still Hungry?'
2022-2023 Clore Leadership/AHRC award for supervising Dr Sona Datta's research project on the 1943 Bengal Famine and Churchill archives
Qualifications
- HEA Fellowship, Higher Education Academy, November 2024
- PhD, King's College London, United Kingdom, 2015 - 2019
- MPhil, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2006 - 2007
- Second BA, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2004 - 2006
- MA, Jadavpur University, India, 2002 - 2004
- BA, Jadavpur University, India, 1999 - 2002
Employment
- Programme Director, BA History and History & Politics, City, University of London, United Kingdom, January 2024 - January 2026
- Past & Present Postdoctoral Fellow: Race, Ethnicity and Equality in History, Royal Historical Society, United Kingdom, 2020 - 2022
- Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellow, School of Advanced Study, United Kingdom, 2019 - 2020
Fellowships
- Fellow (FRHistS), Royal Historical Society, October 2023 - present
Memberships of professional organisations
- AHRC Connected Curriculum Network in History, 2021 - present
- Member of British Association for South Asian Studies, 2020 - present
Languages
Bengali (can read, write, speak, understand spoken, peer review), English (can read, write, speak, understand spoken, peer review) and Hindi (can read, write, speak, understand spoken)
Expertise
Geographic Areas
- Asia - South Central
Publications
Publications by category
Book
- Gupta, D. (2023). India in the Second World War. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0197694705.
Chapters (5)
- Gupta, D. (2025). Docile Bodies? Reflections on a recruitment photograph from India during the Second World War. In Ferris, K. and Halstead, H. (Eds.), Miniatures: A Reader in the History of Everyday Life (pp. 212-217). Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press. ISBN 9781804130018.
- Gupta, D. (2024). Power and the Colonial Archive. Adam Matthew Digital.
- Diya, G. (2024). Analysing Imperialism through Colonial Photography. Adam Matthew Digital.
- Gupta, D. and Gallego Larrarte, B. (2018). Exploring intersections between creative and critical writing: the interview. In Marshall, G. and Eagleston, R. (Eds.), English: Shared Futures (pp. 136-143). Martlesham, UK: Boydell & Brewer. ISBN 9781843845164.
- Gupta, D. and Maguire, A. War and Peace. In Harris, A. and Whyte, W. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern British History Oxford University Press.
Journal articles (5)
- Gupta, D. (2023). A Memoir’s Exploration of Love and Loss - Lyn Innes, The Last Prince of Bengal. Women: a cultural review, 34(4), pp. 473-476. doi:10.1080/09574042.2023.2278338
- Maguire, A. and Gupta, D. (2021). Teaching Empire and War: Animating Marginalized Histories in the Classroom. History Workshop Journal, 92, pp. 208-225. doi:10.1093/hwj/dbab023
- Gupta, D. (2020). War through the eyes of the colonized. Patterns of Prejudice, 54(5), pp. 553-555. doi:10.1080/0031322x.2021.1892312
- Gupta, D. (2020). Bodies in Hunger: Literary Representations of the Indian Home-Front During World War II. Journal of War & Culture Studies, 13(2), pp. 196-214. doi:10.1080/17526272.2019.1644274
- Gupta, D. (2019). The Raj in radio wars. Media History, 25(4), pp. 414-429. doi:10.1080/13688804.2019.1633911
Report
- Finn, M. and Gupta, D. (2020). Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History: RHS Roadmap for Change II. London, UK: Royal Historical Society.
Professional activities
Collaboration (industrial)
-
Lead partner of Art and poetry commission for 80th anniversary of 1943 Bengal Famine project ( 2023 - present)
Other partners: Swadhinata Trust
Collaborations (academic) (3)
-
Advisory panel member for new MA curriculum project (January 2024 - present)
Other partners: Queen Mary, University of London, and Imperial War Museums -
Researcher of ‘Provisional Semantics' project project ( 2021)
Sponsored by AHRC
Other partners: Imperial War Museums -
Researcher of Devolving Restitution: African Collections in UK Museums Beyond London project ( 2020 - 2022)
Sponsored by Open Society Foundations, University of Oxford, Art Fund
Other partners: Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford
Consultancy (2)
- Consultant, BBC One series ‘World on Fire’, Season Two (Public Sector) ( 2022)
- Consultant, BBC Radio 4’s ‘Legacy of War’ series (Public Sector) ( 2020)
Editorial activity
- Commissioned and edited over 20 blog posts, Editor, ‘Writing Race’ blog series, Royal Historical Society, 2021 - 2022.
Online articles (10)
- The Reading List: Bengal. (2023). History Today magazine
- Head to Head: What Influence has the BBC had on History? (2022). History Today magazine
- Book review of Daniel Morse’s 'Radio Empire: The BBC’s Eastern Service and the Emergence of the Global Anglophone Novel'. (2021). LSE Review of Books
- Book review of Priya Atwal’s 'Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire'. (2021). LSE Review of Books
- Book review of Emilia Terracciano’s 'Art and Emergency: Modernism in Twentieth-Century India'. (2020). Tribune Magazine
- Book review of Ghee Bowman’s 'The Indian Contingent: The Forgotten Muslim Soldiers of Dunkirk'. (2020). Tribune Magazine
- The untold story of India’s PoWs. (2019). BBC History magazine
- Why remembrance of Indian soldiers who fought for the British in World War II is so political. (2017). The Conversation
- Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk and the Cultural Memory of a Global War. (2017). CNN News 18
- Bengal boys of the “good war”. (2015). The Telegraph (India)
Radio programme
- The Big Debate: India's contribution to the Second World War. BBC Asian Network (2019).
Television programmes (4)
- Interviewed on 'Erased: WW2's Heroes of Colour'. National Geographic/Disney (2024).
- Interviewed on documentary ‘Dunkirk: Mission Impossible'. Channel 5 (2021).
- Interviewed on documentary ‘Churchill: Six Moments that made the Man’. Channel 5 (2020).
- Interviewed on documentary ‘How Britain won World War Two'. Channel 5 (2020).