Dr. Jayanta Sengupta
Secretary & curator of Victoria Memorial
Dr. Jayanta Sengupta is currently Secretary and Curator (Director) of the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, India’s most-visited museum and the largest one in modern Indian history. Till recently, he was also Director-in-Charge of the Indian Museum, Kolkata, and of the Anthropological Survey of India. Educated at Presidency College, Kolkata, and at the Universities of Calcutta and Cambridge, he has taught History for more than two decades at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and the University of Notre Dame in the United States, before joining the museum profession in 2013. He has also been a Visiting Professor or Fellow at the Universities of Cambridge, Pennsylvania, Heidelberg, Utah, Exeter, and Calcutta. In 2015-16, he was the Getty Foundation International Fellow of the American Alliance of Museums and a representative of the Government of India on the UNESCO Intergovernmental Expert Committee on the Protection and Promotion of Museums and Collections. His research focuses on the interrelationship between colonialism, nationalism, and democracy and authoritarianism in modern South Asia, cultural practices in modern India, and transnational and comparative intellectual history. His first book, titled At the Margins: Discourses of Development, Democracy and Regionalism in Orissa, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015, and second, titled Those Noble Edifices: the Raj Bhavans of Bengal, was published by the Victoria Memorial Hall in July 2019.