Ninad Pandit

Ninad Pandit is an architect, urban planner and a historian of modern South Asia. His scholarship examines the relationships between urbanization, industrialization and the emergence of radical politics in colonial India.

Ninad’s book manuscript, The Bombay Radicals, is based on his dissertation and tells the story of working-class organizations in western India, from their origins in caste reform movement to their embrace of socialism and the Communist International and eventual decline into regional chauvinist political parties. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a group of young organizers—the Bombay Radicals—were inspired by the international working-class movement to expand the ideals of late-19th century caste reformers to encompass all industrial workers in India. They built one of the largest workers’ movements in the colonial world. At the same time, their engagement with anti-colonial politics of the Indian National Congress revived older linguistic and regional chauvinist ideas that would undermine the progressive import of this movement.

Ninad received his PhD from the Department of History at Princeton University. He previously trained as an urban planner and designer with a degree in City Planning/Design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as an architect at KRVIA, Mumbai University. He has previously worked and taught at Yale University as the Singh Postdoctoral Fellow and at LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science as the Mellon Fellow in Cities and the Humanities.

At the Cooper Union, Ninad teaches courses on the history of the modern world in the HSS Core Curriculum and electives on urban histories of the global south.

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Princeton University (2009 — 2015)
• Master of Arts - MA Princeton University (2009 — 2011)
• Master of City Planning Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2007 — 2009)
• Bachelor of Architecture - BArch University of Mumbai

Companies

• Visiting Assistant Professor and Director of the Benjamin Menschel Fellowship Program The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2020)
• Senior Consultant, Academics & Reseach Indian Institute for Human Settlements (2019 — 2019)
• Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Science The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2017 — 2018)
• Singh Postodoctoral Associate Yale University (2016 — 2017)
• Mellon Fellow in Cities and the Humanities The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) (2015 — 2016)