Kumud Ranjan

Kumud Ranjan is a Critical Caste Studies Fellow in the Committee on Southern Asian Studies and a Postdoctoral Researcher and Instructor in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division, affiliated with the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, at the University of Chicago. His research is broadly situated in the history of social and political thought, with particular interests in political theory, intellectual history, and modern South Asian thought. His first book, Rethinking Emancipation: A Pragmatic Reading of Arendt, Ambedkar, and Du Bois, is forthcoming with Brill. The book engages with the intellectual and political trajectories of B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Hannah Arendt, bringing them into conversation to illuminate cross-historical debates on democracy, emancipation, belonging, and humanism in global political and social theory. His next research project examines constitutionalism and political belonging in twentieth-century South Asian and American political thought.