Nazmul Sultan
Bio:
Nazmul Sultan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His research interests include the history of political thought, empire and anticolonial thought, democratic theory, and ideas of the global.
His first book, Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024), examines how a foundational set of disputes over the terms of modern peoplehood underwrote the formation of the democratic project in colonial India. By reframing the problem of anticolonialism in modern Indian political thought, the book offers a new interpretation of the rise of democracy on a global scale.
Sultan is currently working on two projects. The first reconstructs the intellectual history of the postcolonial state in mid-century political thought. Tracing the fraught origins of the postcolonial state in postwar political thought and the social sciences, the book-length project seeks to reflect on the philosophical foundations of democratic statehood in the early postcolonial era. The second, longer-term project investigates the global condition of modern political thought. Through a reconsideration of the global histories of a key set of political ideas (equality, patriotism, colonialism), it analyzes the formation of the modern conception of the globe and its implications for the study of political thought.
Sultan is also editing a selection of Rabindranath Tagore’s political writings. This editorial project, which is under contract with Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, will be bringing together Tagore’s representative political writings in one single volume.
Sultan holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Before joining Yale, he was Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia and, previously, the George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge.
Contact:
- 115 Prospect Street, Rosenkranz Hall, New Haven, CT 06511
- nazmul.sultan@yale.edu
Articles and Book Chapters (Selected)
- “What is Colonialism? The Dual Claims of a Twentieth-Century Political Category,” American Political Science Review 119, no. 1 (2025): 435-448.
- “Moral Empire and the Global Meaning of Gandhi’s Anti-Imperialism,” Review of Politics 84, no. 4 (2022): 545-569.
- “Between the Many and the One: Anticolonial Federalism and Popular Sovereignty,” Political Theory 50, no. 2 (2022): 247-274; DOI:
- “Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India,” American Political Science Review 114, no. 1 (2020): 81-94.
- “Constituent Power in India: Authorization and Transformation,” Oxford Handbook of Constituent Power, eds. Peter Niesen, Markus Patberg, Lucia Rubinelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
- “The Liberal Rammohun Roy: A History of Indian Intellectual History,” The Cambridge Companion to Rammohun Roy eds. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rosinka Chaudhuri, and Tanika Sarkar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)