Kushal Nandwani

Kushal Nandwani is a doctoral candidate in the History and Philosophy of Science program at the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values and the Department of History. He is trained as a historian of modern South Asia with interests in postcolonial studies, history of science, medicine & technology, science and technology studies, and legal history. His dissertation offers an intellectual history of criminology in India by exploring how the racial medical discourse of the late-nineteenth century combined with new academic formations in the subsequent period, such as physical anthropology, to inform discussions over crime and criminality at a time when governance of a post-colonial India was beginning to attract the attention of nationalist leaders. Criminal and Penal reforms have been central to colonial paramountcy in India and to the global rise and expansion of the modern governmental state, and by offering an historical account of the different forms of knowledge systems that competed with each other to explain the causes of criminality, in a non-Western context, his work expands scholarship on the intellectual shifts, such as the growth of statistics, that undergirded governance initiatives of the colonial and post-colonial Indian state.

In addition to the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values and the Department of History, his research has been supported by the Franco Institute for Liberal Arts and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame, where he is also a Doctoral Affiliate.

Before joining Notre Dame, he received Bachelor's degrees in Political Science and Law from the University of Delhi, and a Master's in Law from Azim Premji University. He has also taught as an Assistant Professor of Law at the Institute of Law, Nirma University.