Charu Gupta is a Senior Professor of Modern India at the Department of History, University of Delhi. The focus of her research is gender, sexuality, masculinity, caste, medicine, religious identities, and vernacular literatures in early-twentieth-century North India. Her latest book Hindi Hindu Histories: Caste, Ayurveda, Travel, and Communism in Early Twentieth-Century India has been co-published by Permanent Black and SUNY Press (2024). Her other books include Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (Permanent Black, 2001 & Palgrave, 2002; paperbacks 2005, 2008, 2012); The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print (Permanent Black & University of Washington Press, 2016; paperback 2017); Contested Coastlines: Fisherfolk, Nations and Borders in South Asia (2008, co-auth.); Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism (2012, ed.); Caste and Life Narratives (2019, co-ed.); Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular: Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia (2021, co-ed.); and Communal Geographies: Before and Beyond Partition in South Asia (2025, co-ed).

She also regularly writes in Hindi and is the author of Streetva Se Hindutva Tak: Aupaniveshik Bharat Mein Yaunikta Aur Saampradayikta (Rajkamal, 2012) and Jati aur Ling: Dalit, Savarna aur Hindi Print Sanskriti (Vani Prakashan, 2023). Her writings have been translated in multiple languages, including Marathi and Bengali. She servers on the editorial boards of leading journals like South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, South Asia Research, and Gender & History. A PhD graduate from SOAS, University of London, she has been a Distinguished Visiting Scholar-in-Residence, Rutgers University; Visiting Fellow at Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago; Visiting Professor and ICCR Chair, University of Vienna; Visiting Faculty, Yale University and Washington University; and Rama Watamull Distinguished Indian Visiting Scholar, University of Hawaii. She has also been a Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi; Social Science Research Council, New York; Asian Scholarship Foundation, Thailand; Wellcome Institute, London; and University of Oxford. Charu Gupta’s groundbreaking work continues to shape the understanding of gender, sexuality, caste and popular Hindi print in Indian History.