Tapati Guha-Thakurta is an Indian historian who has written about the cultural history and art of India. She is Director and a professor of history at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and was previously a professor at Presidency College, Kolkata and Calcutta University. She earned her DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Tapati specializes in cultural history, history of art, and visual studies. She has written widely and taught courses on art; nationalism and modernity; the institutional practices and political locations of art history and archaeology; the careers of monuments and museum objects; and popular urban visual culture of modern and contemporary India. She has authored exhibition monographs and co-edited two anthologies of essays. Her most notable books includes, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Columbia University Press, and Permanent Black, 2004), and In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (Delhi: Primus Books, 2015).