Vanshika Poddar

Contact
Email: vanshika.poddar@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
ORCID: 0009-0003-7632-3500

Biography

Vanshika Poddar is the Research Assistant for the Indian Collection at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. She is also a DPhil student at the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford. Vanshika assists with archive cataloguing, digitisation, display and labels, and provenance research.

Vanshika completed her Master's in Archaeology from the University of Oxford in 2024 and has been working in collections care and research since. Prior to her appointment as Research Assistant, she was part of the Oxford Museums' Collections Move Team, where she assisted with the documentation, auditing, and transfer of Oxford's museum collections to the newly-opened Collections Teaching and Research Centre (CTRC).

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Research

Vanshika has varied research interests, primarily focusing on the archaeology of South Asia. She began her archaeological research career based in Delhi, India, where she worked on documenting endangered archaeological sites and studying community relationships with heritage, and grassroot approaches to rescue archaeology. Her current research focuses on museum curation and provenance research.

Currently a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, Vanshika is interested in investigating the production, trade, and movement of ethnographic objects in North India from the 19th century to the present and their journey to museums in the UK.