I am a political theorist with particular interests in the history of political thought, empire and anticolonial political thought, popular sovereignty, and ideas of the global.                                    

My first book, Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024), examines how a foundational set of disputes over the terms of modern peoplehood underwrote the formation of the democratic project in colonial India. Situating the question of popular sovereignty at the center of the monumental clash between the British Empire and Indian anticolonial movement, the book reconstructs a competing set of Indian attempts to redefine the meaning of the people, ranging from a skeptical approach to the criterion of popular authorization to a persistent questioning of the idea of popular unity. By reframing the problem of anticolonialism in modern Indian political thought, the book offers a new interpretation of the rise of democracy on a global scale.

I am currently working on two projects. The first reconstructs the intellectual history of the postcolonial state in mid-century political thought. Tracing the fraught origins of the postcolonial state in postwar political thought and the social sciences, the book-length project seeks to reflect on the philosophical foundations of democratic statehood in the early postcolonial era. The second, longer-term project investigates the global condition of modern political thought. Through a reconsideration of the global histories of a key set of political ideas (equality, patriotism, colonialism), it analyzes the formation of the modern conception of the globe and its implications for the study of political thought. Articles related to the project have appeared in the American Political Science Review and Review of Politics.

I am also editing a selection of Rabindranath Tagore’s political writings. This editorial project, which is under contract with Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, will be bringing together Tagore’s representative political writings in one single volume.  The volume will feature new translations of Tagore’s key political writings in Bengali, along with a curated selection of his political essays and lectures in English.

Before joining Yale, I was Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia and, previously, the George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and my B.A. in Philosophy and Politics from the City University of New York. Prior to that, I also studied briefly at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh.

Contact:

• 115 Prospect Street, Rosenkranz Hall, New Haven, CT 06511
• nazmul.sultan@yale.edu