Olivia Majumdar

Research Associate: Literary and Artistic Archives

Olivia Majumdar is a Research Associate working with the Fitzwilliam Museum’s 18-19th century literary and artistic archives. Her research interests include Victorian literature and its global circulation, diversifying Victorian studies, and making connections between the archive and creative writing. 

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 ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’, a project digitising early printed books from 1714-1914, where she identified and wrote on colonial-era translations of Victorian literature. She was also Project Curator for ‘India 75 Events’, a programme commemorating the 75th anniversary of Independence through 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 fiction to craft a novel of British India.