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

My first book, Waiting for the People: Anticolonialism and the Idea of Democracy in India (forthcoming with Harvard University Press), studies how a foundational set of disputes over the terms of peoplehood underwrote the formation of the idea of democracy in colonial India. In so doing, the book offers a new interpretation of the rise of popular sovereignty on a global scale and invites a reconsideration of anticolonialism as a theoretical and historical problem.

I am also in the early stages of a second project on how the imperial unification of the globe in the nineteenth and the unraveling of global empires in the twentieth century transformed the scope and orientation of political thought, both European and non-European.

My research has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, and Review of Politics, among others. 

Before joining UBC, I served as 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 BA 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.

Thank you for visiting my website. Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions (email: nazmul.sultan@ubc.ca).