Meet the team
Principal Investigator
Daniela De Simone is an Italian archaeologist with expertise in the protohistoric and historical archaeology of South Asia, and serves as Assistant Professor of South Asian Archaeology at Ghent University. Her research advances a transdisciplinary approach to past societies, examining the relationships between human communities, non-human actors, material culture, and ecological systems across forested and maritime environments.
She is also Principal Investigator of the Nilgiri Archaeological Project: Culture and Environment in the Upland Forests of South India from Antiquity to Early Modernity (G0F0621N), funded by the Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO) through an Odysseus II grant.
She holds a PhD in South Asian Studies (Archaeology) from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” (2012). She has advanced training in both Sanskrit and Hindi.
Associated Researchers
Annalisa Bocchetti is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” where she works on a project dedicated to folk and oral traditions in South Asia. Her research focuses broadly on Indo-Islamic cultural worlds, with particular attention to Sufism, storytelling traditions, and the circulation of devotional practices across regions and languages. She previously held a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO) at Ghent University, where she explored forms of religious mobility and multilingual exchange in early modern South Asia. Alongside her work in literary and folklore studies, Annalisa is developing a new line of inquiry that brings together folklore studies and ecological approaches, particularly within the framework of the blue humanities, to investigate South Asian Sufism in relation to its environments. She is especially interested in the ways shrines, saints, and devotional communities engage with non-human environments, and how these interactions shape forms of spiritual belonging and regional identity.
Sunil Gupta is a Senior Research Fellow at the Indian Archaeological Society, New Delhi, where he is also Editor of the Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology. Previously, he served as Director of the Allahabad Museum, and subsequently held a post as Officer on Special Duty at the Prime Ministers Museum, New Delhi. He was Senior Reserch Fellow at the Centre for the World in the Viking Age at Uppsala University (2025), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (2024), and the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies at Ghent University (2022–2023).
Sunil earned his doctorate in ancient sea-trade between the Roman Empire and India at Deccan College, Pune University. His research spans early Indian Ocean history, long-distance exchange networks, syncretic techno-cultural traditions, and ancient globalisation processes around the BCE–CE transition. He is the recipient of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s UK Nehru Fellowship, the postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Vivekananda Fellowship for Museum Excellence at the Art Institute, Chicago. Sunil has directed archaeological excavations at the ancient port site of Kamrej in western India and is the author of Early Sculptural Art in the Indian Coastlands. He continues to publish extensively on the archaeology of the Indian Ocean.
Parvathi Nayar is a Chennai-based multidisciplinary contemporary artist whose practice spans drawing, installation, film, photography and textual inquiry to interrogate the complex interrelations between human subjectivity, environmental processes, and the spatial, and perceptual systems through which the world is apprehended.
Her oeuvre is distinguished by a sustained critical engagement with Water–and especially its Oceanic and fluvial ecologies, its role as a contested resource within climate and urban discourses, and its symbolic, cosmological, and epistemic significance.
Nayar curated the award-winning exhibition The Living Ocean (2024) and the multi-room narrative installation Limits of Change (2025). Her work has been exhibited widely across India and internationally in biennales, museums, and public arenas. Notable solo exhibitions that deal with ocean, water and ecologies include “The Primordial” (Mumbai, 2026), “Biome” (Kolkata, 2025) and "Atlas of Re-Imaginings" (Chennai, 2018). Her multidisciplinary contributions extend to filmmaking, writing and environmental humanities discourse. A founding member of The Hashtag#Collective, she holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins, London.