Pujan Karambeigi specializes in institutional histories of art, with a focus on how art was enlisted as a tool for nation-building in the context of postwar decolonization. His research has been supported by several prestigious fellowships, including the 2025 G.A.S. Foundation Fellowship, the 2024-25 Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art, the 2022–23 Frieda B. and Milton F. Rosenthal Art History fellowship, the DAAD fellowship, and the German National Merit Foundation fellowship, among others. His research has been published in ARTMargins and his criticism has been published by The Nation, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Art in America, Mousse Magazine, among others.
His dissertation, titled Heritage and the Art of Nation-Building: UNESCO’s Museum Program in the Context of Decolonization, 1953–1972, examines how artists and art historians forged cultural heritage as a new field of expertise in the aftermath of empire. While scholarship on modernism and decolonization has largely emphasized style, hybridity, and national schools, it has paid less attention to how the infrastructures that sustained art—cataloguing systems, conservation practices, and pedagogical reforms—redefined its meanings in a postcolonial world. Three case studies—Nigeria’s Regional Center for Museum Technicians, the preservation and tourism projects at Persepolis, and Sam Ntiro’s reforms of arts and crafts pedagogy in Tanzania—show how debates over provenance, preservation, and pedagogy recast objects as “heritage” and bound artistic practice to projects of nation-building. Figures such as Yvonne Oddon, Denis Williams, Frank Stella, Ekpo Eyo, and Sam Ntiro emerge as central protagonists in this process, navigating UNESCO’s bureaucracy while experimenting with new ways of classifying, preserving, and producing art. By foregrounding their work, the dissertation reframes heritage not as an abstract policy category but as a competing set of art historical practices that reshaped institutions, redefined expertise, and altered the conditions under which art and national cultures were imagined after empire.
