2024-25 EIHS Postdoctoral Fellow
About
Sikandar M. Kumar is a historian of colonial and postcolonial South Asia and the British empire. His current research is on idioms of democratic imagining and languages of moral belonging, which played a crucial role in the vernacularization of Indian political modernity in nineteenth and twentieth century north India. He develops an alternate reading praxis to bring focus to ideological disruptions and social questioning in vernacular literature, to account for the enduring appeal and legacy of the intellectual canon of late colonialism. His research has been supported by the Rackham Humanities Dissertation Fellowship, and he received the Sydney Fine Prize for “outstanding teaching” in 2019.
As Postdoctoral Fellow, Kumar will prepare his first book manuscript based on his PhD dissertation, tentatively titled, “The Democratic Commons: Vernacular Genealogies of Political Modernity in North India.” He is currently revising an article on the use of the concept of “commonalization” in late-colonial literature, and the ideological construction of “feudalism.” In 2024-25, Kumar will teach courses on “Empires and Nations in South Asia,” and “The Rise and Fall of the British Empire.”
