Ujaan Ghosh specializes in the architectural and urban history of South Asia. His first book project, Empire in a Temple Town: Contesting Religion, Built Environment, and Colonial Governance in Puri, offers a new account of colonial urbanism and spatial governance in South Asia by examining how religion, built space, and imperial power intersected in a temple town under British rule. Puri, home to one of Hinduism’s most important temples, appeared again and again in woodcuts, missionary prints, antiquarian sketches, and architectural plans that turned it into something more than a place. To British eyes, Puri became a dystopia, associated with death, disease, and disorder; a site that was deemed too religious, too crowded, too filthy, and too unsanitary. Moving through the textual, visual, and spatial production of the site in travelogues, periodicals, and the archival documents of the colonial state, the book demonstrates the ways in which the British Empire developed techniques of representing and regulating religious sites in the colonial world. At the same time, it shows how this distant temple town, separated from Britain by three continents and two oceans, became a mirror in which the empire saw its own anxieties, ambitions, and limits. Ghosh's article have been published in Modern Asian Studies (Combating ‘Filth’: The temple, the state, and urbanization in late nineteenth-century Puri), History of Religions (Chariots of the Gods: The Many Histories of Jagannath, “Juggernaut,” and the Rathayatra in the Nineteenth Century), Journal of South Asian Studies (The City Possessed: Ghost Stories and the Urban History of Late Colonial Calcutta). 

Ghosh's second book project focuses on the everyday histories of preservation and archaeology in late colonial South Asia in the twentieth century. It explores the intersection of religion, law, and preservation practice by studying the lives of small monuments, notably rural temples, mosques, dargahs, and tombs in eastern India. Particular attention is devoted to the histories of Islamic monuments and their custodians, who often faced disproportionate intervention from colonial authorities, a theme that finds parallel in contemporary India, with the rise of Hindu nationalism.

Ghosh is also a translator of Pre-Modern Sanskrit and Vernacular poetry. He is interested in the ways in which Sanskrit poetics and canons got refashioned in vernacular literary cultures in Early Modern South Asia. His co-authored piece on the intersection of Odia vernacular poetics and the epic Ramayana was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (Refiguring Baidehīśa Bilāsa: Reading the Queer and the Erotic in Upendra Bhanja’s Rāmāyaṇa). He also co-translated with Amrita Chowdhury, the first English translation of Upendra Bhanja's seventeenth century Odia Rāmāyaṇa, Baidehiśa Bilāsa: The Amorous Plays of Sita's Husband. One of the most popular retellings of the Rāmāyaṇa in eastern India, the text is widely known for its unusual depiction of the erotic lives of its protagonists, Rāma and Sītā. Ghosh is currently working on a project that focuses on the intersection of caste and literary production in fifteenth century Odisha, by examining the fifteenth century Odia Mahābhārata, composed by Sāralādāsa. His first article on the text, based on the preliminary archival work, Struggling with Kṛṣṇa: Alternative Imaginations in an Odia Mahābhārata, was published in 2025, in the International Journal of Hindu Studies. A second article, Duryodhana as Nārāyaṇa, Duryodhana as Rāma: Epic reimaginations and the vernacular world of the Mahābhārata, will appear as part of an edited collection on the Routledge Companion to the Mahābhārata (2027).