Saumya Agarwal is an assistant professor at O P Jindal Global University. She completed her PhD from Heidelberg University in 2021. Her primary area of research are wall paintings decorating 19th and 20th-century merchant houses in Rajasthan, India. She has a strong interest in approaching the visual in innovative ways as an important resource for socio-historical enquiry. She is currently conducting ethnohistoric research on the painters of Shekhawati, which has been funded by a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts. She has previously been a research fellow at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. She has also been visiting faculty at Ashoka University and taught as assistant professor at several Delhi University colleges. Her academic articles have been published in national and international journals including Economic and Political Weekly and Journal of Early Popular Visual Culture. She also regularly contributes to academic blogs, podcasts, and news websites. Her areas of interest include concepts of time and temporality, place-making practices, arts of South Asia, popular visual culture, artistic practices, transcultural studies, heritage studies and film studies.