Conference 2018

Aishwary Kumar

Assistant Professor of History, Stanford University

Aishwary Kumar is a political theorist and intellectual historian of South Asia, empire, and the modern democratic imagination. His work engages a wide spectrum of issues in moral and political philosophy, religion and political freedom, and global lineages of citizenship and rights. He has also written on rhetoric, law, and the constitutional imaginary, agency and philosophy of action in a range of sacrificial and anti-war traditions, the postcolonial struggle with the minority as moral form, and the limits of nationalist constructions of the human. Kumar's first book, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford, 2015), examines the relationship between religious conceptions of freedom and the origins of democratic disobedience in anticolonial thought, with an emphasis on the transformation of liberal and theological articulations of authority over the last two centuries. Radical Equality was listed by The Indian Express among the 15 most important books on politics and morality to be published that year. He is now completing, on political judgment and notions of force, his second book, The Sovereign Void: Ambedkar's Critique of Violence.