Ravinder Kaur

Short presentation

Ravinder Kaur is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Kaur works across the disciplines of history, anthropology, and international politics. Her core research focuses on two formative moments in the history of modern India: the mid-20th century political liberation and the making of the postcolonial state, and the 1990s economic liberalisation, which reforged India as an emerging market power.

Her most recent work Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First India (Stanford University Press, 2020), delves into the processes of capitalist transformations in India. Tracing the long history of the 1990s economic reforms, the book unpacks the ongoing transformation of the postcolonial nation into an ‘attractive investment destination’, and the attendant rise of investment-fuelled cultural nationalism. The book was on the Financial Times Best Book of the Year list.  It has been featured on Political Theory Other,  Rune Lykkeberg's Langsomme Samtaler, and Grand Tamasha, among others. See a virtual book round table here. 

Her first book Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (Oxford 2007, 2018) is grounded in the history of modern Delhi city. It draws attention to the government of humanitarian crisis – of displacement, the loss of home and livelihood – and the making of the modern nation and its citizenry along the intersection of caste, class and gender. The ethnographic focus of this work is broadly on decolonisation, state formation, and the making of modern citizenship.

Kaur is a Global History Fellow at the Weatherhead Institute of Global History (WIGH), Harvard University. She has also received The Carlsberg Foundation Semper Ardens Monograph Fellowship to examine the histories of "economic miracles" and geo-economic frontiers across Asia and Africa. This research builds upon two major research programs she has led: ‘Emerging Worlds: Explorations of New South-South Connections’ (2014-2019) and ‘Nation in Motion: Globalization, Governance and Development in New India’ (2010-2015).

She is currently leading a research project, "Green Futures: Strategic Partnerships in the Anthropocene" (2024-2028), which examines a distinct form of "green diplomacy" that has emerged in the shadow of the climate crisis.     

Some of her readings can be accessed here and here  

Monographs

Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First Century India (Stanford University Press, 2020; Harper Collins India, 2021)

Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi', Oxford University Press, 2007 (new edition 2018)

Edited Books and Journals (selected)

Economic Miracles and Their Afterlives (Duke University Press, 2025) co-edited with Barbara Weinstein

The People of India: New Indian Politics in the Twenty-First Century (Penguin, 2022) coedited with Nayanika Mathur

Journal Articles (selected)

Crisis Futures: Covid-19 and the Speculative Turning Point of History, Global Discourse, 2022 12:641-658. 

World as Commodity: Or, How the "Third World" Became an "Emerging Market", Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2018, Volume 38(2): 377-395

I am India Shining: The Investor Citizen and the Indelible Icon of Good Times, Journal of Asian Studies,  2016, Volume 75 (3): 621-648

Distinctive Citizenship: Refugees, Subjects and Postcolonial State in India’s Partition, Cultural and Social History, Volume 6, Number 4, 429-446. 2009.

Teaching

Core Courses

• Globalisation and Development
• Theory of Science
• South Asian Society and Politics
• Indian Political Economy

PhD Supervision

• I welcome PhD supervision in broad areas of contemporary history, politics, and anthropology of South Asia. Specifically, my area of expertise relates to the making of the postcolonial State, nation and nationalism; visual politics, histories of the Third World, emerging markets, refugee resettlement, Partition memory and citizenship.