Aditya Kumar
ProdiG+ Fellow | Lecturer

Department of Asian & Asian American Studies
HUMANITIES 1095

aditya.v.kumar@stonybrook.edu 

 

 

 

 

 

Biography

Aditya "Adi" Kumar is a PRODiG+ Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University. A historian of South Asian America, Asian American social movements, and the United States in the World, he holds a Ph.D. in History from Yale University (2026) and a B.A. in History (Honors) and Political Science from Brown University (2017).

His research recovers Third World Left internationalism, anti-imperial political geographies, and South Asian American activism in the Long 1970s. His dissertation, Diaspora Defiant: Indian Americans, the Third World, and India's 1975 Emergency, is the first full-length study of diasporic mobilization against India's twenty-one-month Emergency. It traces forty-eight distinct organizations across more than twenty North American cities through multi-sited archival research and forty-four oral interviews. His work has been supported by the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF), the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM) at Yale, and the MacMillan International Dissertation Research Fellowship. From 2024–26, he was a Visiting Academic at New York University's Asian/Pacific/American Institute.

At Stony Brook, Kumar teaches "Race in South Asian America" (AAS 212), an introductory course that explores the history of South Asians in America through the lenses of race, relationality, and identity. A committed public humanist, he has led digital humanities projects on Asian American activism and Third World movements, including the Asian American Cultural Center Virtual Museum at Yale. He has also served as Graduate Coordinator for Yale's Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and Coordinator of the Yale Asian American Working Group. He warmly welcomes conversations with undergraduates curious about Asian American studies and with graduate students working on histories of migration, diaspora, and social movements. Students are encouraged to reach out to him at aditya.v.kumar@stonybrook.edu.