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Neeti Nair

Fellow

Term

September 3, 2024 — May 23, 2025

Professional affiliation

Professor of History, University of Virginia
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Expertise

  • Cold War
  • Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding
  • Democracy
  • History
  • Human Rights
  • Migration
  • Population
  • Security and Defense
  • Society and Culture

Wilson Center Projects

Capitals in the Margins: South Asia Since Partition

Full Biography

Neeti Nair is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India (Harvard University Press, 2011) and, most recently, Hurt Sentiments: Secularism and Belonging in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 2023). She is also the co-editor of Ghosts from the Past? Assessing Recent Developments in Religious Freedom in South Asia (Routledge, 2021) and editor of Citizenship, Belonging, and the Partition of India (Routledge, 2024). She has written for numerous publications including Current History, Indian Express, The Hindu, The Print, Newslaundry. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Major Publications

  • Hurt Sentiments: Secularism and Belonging in South Asia, Harvard University Press, 2023
  • Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India, Harvard University Press, 2011
  • 'Toward Mass Education or an "Aristocracy of Talent": Nonalignment and the Making of a Strong India', in Gyan Prakash, Michael Laffan, and Nikhil Menon eds. The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia, Bloomsbury, 2018

Previous Terms

Sep 05, 2017 — Jul 27, 2018: Blasphemy: A South Asian History