Nitasha Kaul

Nitasha Kaul is a multidisciplinary academic, novelist, economist, poet, and public intellectual. She holds a Chair in Politics, International Relations, and Critical Interdisciplinary Studies and is Director of Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD), University of Westminster. She has published widely on themes relating to democracy, political economy, Hindutva/Indian politics, misogyny, technology/Artificial Intelligence, identity, rise of right-wing nationalism, feminist and postcolonial critiques, small states in geopolitics, regions of Bhutan, Kerala, and Kashmir.

She holds a BA Honours in Economics from SRCC, University of Delhi, an MSc (Economics) with a specialisation in Public Policy and a Joint PhD in Economics & Philosophy from University of Hull, and has previously been a tenured Assistant Professor in Economics at the Bristol Business School and Associate Professor in Creative Writing in Bhutan. In addition to being a widely-travelled multidisciplinary academic, Professor Kaul is an award-winning novelist, and media commentator. Her interventions on politics, democracy, gender, and human rights have appeared in major international radio, televisual, and print media including BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, DW, France 24, The Guardian, and The Independent. She has delivered invited lectures and keynotes at institutions around the world, addressing diverse audiences, including U.S. Congress, U.N, and European Parliament.

Professor Kaul is the recipient of multiple research grants and awards for her research, writing, and activism. She is the author of over 150 publications, including 7 single-authored or edited scholarly and literary books, book chapters in numerous critical and ground-breaking edited collections, plus peer-reviewed original research articles in numerous journals across humanities and social science disciplines. Her books include the monograph Imagining Economics Otherwise: Encounters with identity/difference (Routledge, 2007), and political fiction telling the stories of conflict and identity, such as her novel Future Tense (Harper Collins, 2020) and the Man-Asian Literary Prize shortlisted novel Residue (Rainlight, 2014) that was the first novel in English by a Kashmiri woman author.

A focus on creating knowledge narratives to raise critical consciousness to build resilient democracies and lift the voices and views that are marginalised resonates through all her work; she highlights the need for social justice and human rights internationally and acts to combat prejudice and challenge the politics of hate. Across disciplines, geographies, and over the years, the themes that motivate her work are as follows: the need to foreground and critically analyse -- institutions and systematisations of knowledge trajectories (and their link to systems of oppression, discourses of legitimisation, and narratives of dispossession); indigenisations of political expression; the use of memory as a resource; and the understanding of identities as they travel through the disciplining processes of territory and time.

See https://twitter.com/NitashaKaul and
https://westminster.academia.edu/NitashaKaul/CurriculumVitae