Olivia Majumdar

Research Associate: Literary and Artistic Archives

Olivia Majumdar is a scholar of postcolonial literature with a focus on South Asia and the British Asian diaspora. As a Research Associate at the Fitzwilliam Museum, she is working with the 18-19^th century artistic and literary archives. Her interests include cross-cultural exchange through translation, and histories of race, empire, and migration. She is currently conducting research into the relatively unknown stories of mixed-race Anglo-Indian women in the archive.  

She was formerly Curator of the Urdu and Related Collections at the British Library. There, she led the ‘Our Stories, Ourselves’ display (2024), collaborating with community curators to chronicle British Bangladeshi women’s lives using objects from the Bengali collections. Prior to this, she was Curator for the digitisation project, ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’, and ‘India 75 Events’, a programme that included workshops, seminars, and screenings of arthouse cinema from India and Pakistan.  

She studied languages, literature, and film curation at the Universities of London and Birmingham. Currently, she is working towards a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, drawing upon the imperial archive and Victorian and Edwardian fiction to craft a novel of British India.