Teaching

At Columbia University, I teach the Core Curriculum in Contemporary Civilization, a year-long course that introduces students to major texts in the history of moral and political thought. My teaching emphasizes the continued reinterpretation of these texts and draws connections between ideas that shape the canon of political thought and non-Western political traditions. I encourage students to interrogate concepts such as knowledge, ethics, legitimacy, toleration, religion, power, agency, obligation, and equality through both historical and contemporary lenses.

I treat the texts I teach as shaping living traditions that both reflect and shape struggles over meaning, power, and recognition. I introduce students to the conceptual genealogies of key political ideas, helping them trace how terms like freedom, self-rule, and justice have been shaped by historically diverse ways of being. My courses create space for dialogue across traditions, foregrounding the ethical and political stakes of interpretation. I invite students to read not only for argument, but also to explore how texts and their interpretations can influence worldviews, unveil the diverse involvements that shape and justify political and social power, and unfold means to just, plural, and dignified forms of life.

In previous years, I have designed and taught Gandhi and His Interlocutors, a global core seminar that explores Gandhi’s political philosophy in dialogue with his critical interlocutors, including Ambedkar, Tagore, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and global thinkers, like Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. The course examines debates on non-violence, civil-disobedience, truth, race and caste, empire, majoritarian and minority imaginaries of plural societies, the promises and limits of postcolonial democracy and anticolonial conceptions of freedom, and the ethics of political action.

I have also taught Anticolonialism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy in South Asia, a research seminar that explores how anticolonial thought shapes the political present and future of South Asia. Through themes such as anticolonial constitutionalism, anti-caste reshaping of political life and guarantees, Islamic and indigenous imaginaries in diverse South Asian democracies, long debates on the majoritarian crises in plural democracies, the post-colonial state's reshaping of social life through legal intervention, and the ethics and politics of data governance, this course introduces students to the rich, thriving, yet contested terrain of South Asian constitutionalism and democratic struggle in postcolonial life.

Across all my courses, I aim to cultivate both intellectual rigor and ethical attentiveness so as to equip students to inhabit political thought and its diverse traditions critically and creatively. I design classrooms to be relational and collaborative spaces of learning, where students are invited to reflect on the worlds they come from and to shape rigorous, interdisciplinary modes of thought in return. Drawing from political theory, history, law, religion, and philosophy, I introduce students to new conceptual and methodological frameworks, and invite them to experiment with various media, oral, visual, digital, as legitimate modes of thinking. I seek to create pedagogical environments that affirm the perspectives of students from a wide range of backgrounds, while training them in the tools of ethical reflection and political reasoning.