Please join us in welcoming Dr. Nishant Upadhyay to the Department of Ethnic Studies at CU Boulder! They received their PhD at York University, Toronto, in the Graduate Program of Social and Political Thought in 2016. Their dissertation received the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Award 2018. The award citation expressed admiration for how Dr. Upadhyay’s manuscript was “a remarkable instance of how feminist scholarship advances non-disciplinary thought and practice by holding anti-settler colonialism, anti-Blackness and anti-caste analytics together, whilst making a contribution to postcolonial studies, transnational feminism, and South Asian diaspora studies.”
Dr. Upadhyay is passionate that students of color, especially women, queer, and trans students of color, need to feel like they belong at universities. “Whatever we have to say, think, or write is important for others to learn, and to hear,” they said in a previously published article. “It’s important for us, it’s important for the communities we come from, it’s important for the people who are in the majority or are more privileged to hear what our stories are, and we should not feel dejected by being here.” Dr. Upadhyay encourages students to “continue to do the work you want to do and bring the change.”
Prior to joining CU, Nishant taught Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Northern Arizona University. Their teaching and research focuses on intersections of race, indigeneity, caste, gender, and sexuality. Their book manuscript, Indians on Indian Lands: Transnational Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity, studies the formation of dominant-caste Hindu Indian diasporas in North America and Indian diasporic complicities in processes of settler colonialism, antiblackness, Islamophobia, and brahminical supremacy. The manuscript is under advance contract with the University of Illinois Press.
The Department of Ethnic Studies is wholeheartedly overjoyed to welcome Dr. Upadhyay!