Radha Kumar
Assistant Professor, History
Degree
Ph.D., Princeton University, 2015
Specialties
Modern South Asia: policing and sovereignty, legal history, colonial and post-colonial politics
Courses
HST 122 Global History: 1750 to the present
HST 328 Ancient and Medieval India
HST 329 Making of Modern India
HST 300 Religion in South Asian Politics
HST 300 Caste & Inequality in Modern India
HST 401 (Undergraduate Research Seminar) The Colonial City
Biography
Radha Kumar is a historian
of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, focusing on the Tamil-speaking regions
of southern India. She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled, Police, Politics and the Everyday State,
1900-1975, which uses the lens of policing to study everyday governance, state
violence, and caste politics in the Tamil countryside. The project also
explores how popular politics and state violence were affected by India’s
mid-twentieth century transition to a postcolonial democracy. She teaches
courses on global history, Indian history from the ancient period till the
present day, and caste in modern India.
Publications
“Policing Everyday
Life: The FIR in the Tamil Countryside, c. 1900-1950,” Indian Economic and
Social History Review, 54, 3, 2017, pp. 361-87.
“Seeing Like a
Policeman: Everyday Violence in British India, c. 1900-1950,” in Dwyer,
Nettelbeck and Ryan eds Violence,
Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World, Cambridge Imperial and
Post-colonial Studies, Palgrave Macmillan. (forthcoming).