DIRECTOR

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Aishwary Kumar is Associate Professor of History and Director of The Democracy Institute at Cal Poly Pomona, where he leads The GIFT Project (Global Inquiries in Freedom and Tyranny) and the American Institutions Common Core. Kumar is also Director of Ahimsa Center for Political Nonviolence. He holds a BA from University of Delhi, an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a PhD. from Trinity College, University of Cambridge. 

Kumar works in the fields of intellectual history and political philosophy, with a focus on the global lineages of modern political thought and the moral and constitutional life of the modern democratic experiment. Primarily concerned in his research and teaching with the relationship between human freedom and political violence, Kumar has two distinct sets of philosophical preoccupations. The first engages the moral psychological questions raised by the history of liberalism and democratic institutions and shaped by the vicissitudes of inequality and citizenship in the Global South. The second concerns the relationship between epistemology and politics; that is, the nature of truth, identity, and political faith as they are transformed by human aspirations, conflict, and disappointments.

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Kumar’s teaching and research are animated by the belief that the modern university must combine specialized research of greatest rigor with a commitment to widest possible access to the defining ideas that will shape our century. Along this vector of his scholarship, his writings on liberalism and cruelty, technology and planetary neglect, the coming struggle over constitutions and civil rights, and the structure of political violence and radical nonviolence in the neoliberal world have appeared widely in both print and digital media. Among these are his podcast Mutant: Dialogues at the End of Democracy (2023-2025), now in preparation as a two-volume study under the title After Freedom: Moral Lessons from the Edges of Democracy.

His first book, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015) examined the relationship between religious conceptions of freedom and lineages of democratic disobedience in modern anticolonial traditions, with an emphasis on the transformation of theological and liberal notions of authority and the law over the last two centuries. His forthcoming book isThe Neodemocratic Condition: Freedom and Violence after Neoliberalism.

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Kumar is currently working on two related books in the history of political thought: Ambedkar Among the Stars: Political Violence and the Southern Question, and a companion study on democratic judgment, which takes as its starting point the Obama Presidency and its constitutional aftermath. This book is titled The Gravity of Truth: Disenchantment, Disappointment, Democracy.

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Kumar's work has been supported by institutions in Austria, Germany, South Korea and the United Kingdom. Between 2007 and 2013, he was an associate fellow of the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge University, where he had earlier studied as a Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Scholar for his PhD. In 2006-07, he was awarded the Rouse Ball Fellowship in Modern History at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 2007, he moved to the United States to join the Department of History at Stanford University, where he taught for 11 years until 2018 and directed the Undergraduate Majors Program in History, Philosophy, and the Arts (HPA) from 2013 to 2017.

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In Fall 2013, Kumar was elected fellow of the research group on Global Histories of Enlightenment at the Lichtenberg Kolleg: Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study, Germany. In 2014, research for his first book was supported by Re: Work in Berlin, where he spent the year as Guest of the Director. In 2017, Kumar returned to Europe as a Senior Fellow in Human Rights, Constitutional Politics, and Religious Diversity at the Lichtenberg Kolleg: Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study, Germany. In 2019, he was a senior fellow at the IWM: Institute of the Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. In 2019-20, he was a visiting professor in the Department of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. He has been a contributing member of the Committee on Historical Teleology at the University of Helsinki, Finland from 2011 to 2014. He was a fellow of the Working Group on International Order at the Hoover Institution in 2018-19 and a senior fellow in Stanford Global Studies from 2020 to 2022. He founded and led the global workshop series on “Civility, Cruelty, Truth” at the Stanford Humanities Center between 2011 and 2015.

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Kumar is Co-founder of the Institute for New Global Politics in Silicon Valley, California, where he also serves as the Director of Program & Research. Between 2009 and 2014, Kumar served as fellow of The Teagle Foundation's National Forum for the Future of Liberal Education.

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Kumar’s essays have appeared in a wide range of academic journals, including Modern Intellectual History, Public Culture, Social History, and Contemporary South Asia. He has also contributed essays for several volumes including The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (2020) and The Oxford Handbook of the Global South (forthcoming).