Nazmul Sultan (PhD Chicago, 2020) is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science. His research interests include the history of political thought, empire and anticolonial thought, popular sovereignty, 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. In so doing, the book offers a new interpretation of the rise of democracy on a global scale and invites a reconsideration of anticolonialism as a theoretical and historical problem. 

Nazmul is currently working on two different projects. His next book-length project seeks to theorize the global condition of modern political thought. Through a reconsideration of the global histories of a key set of political ideas (equality, patriotism, colonialism), the book will explore the formation of the modern account of the globe: one, interdependent, dynamically integrated, and yet stubbornly hierarchical. Articles related to the project have appeared in the American Political Science Review and Review of Politics.  

He is also working on 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.  

Before joining UBC, Nazmul was the George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. For more information, please visit his website here. 

Book: 

Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024). 

 Edited Volume: 

Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Political Writings, ed. Nazmul Sultan, trans. Brian Hatcher and Thomas Newbold (under contract with Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) 

Articles and Book Chapters 

• “What is Colonialism? The Dual Claims of a Twentieth-Century Political Category,” American Political Science Review (forthcoming); FirstView: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424000388 
• “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. 
• “Independence, Freedom, Liberation: The Promise of Bangladesh’s Founding,” Economic and Political Weekly LVI, no. 44 (2021): 40-46 
• “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) 

Nazmul welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in the following (and other related) topics:  

• History of political thought 
• Anticolonial political thought 
• Popular sovereignty 
• Global intellectual history 
• Comparative political theory 
• Empire and International Thought 
• Indian political thought 
• South Asian history and politics 

He is also keen to work with students who wish to explore foundational problems in democratic theory from a historical perspective.