DIRECTOR

Aishwary Kumar

Dr. Aishwary Kumar is Professor of History of Political Thought and Institutions, and Director of The Democracy Institute at Cal Poly Pomona, where he chairs The GIFT Project and the American Institutions Common Core. He is also Director of Ahimsa Center for Law & Nonviolence.

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Dr. Kumar received his PhD. in Political Thought from University of Cambridge and was elected Rouse Ball Fellow in Intellectual History at Trinity College, Cambridge. He holds a BA from University of Delhi, and an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Dr. Kumar began as an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in 2007, where he taught for 12 years and served as Director of the Majors Program in History, Philosophy and the Arts (2012-2016). He has held appointments, among other institutions, in History of Consciousness at UC-Santa Cruz and the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and delivered invited lectures on government and constitutionalism at UC-Berkeley, Oxford, Hyderabad, Berlin, Vienna, and Harvard Law.

Dr. Kumar is an intellectual historian and political philosopher primarily concerned with democratic theory, ideals, and institutions. His work focuses on the global lineages of modern political and legal thought and the moral and constitutional life of the liberal democratic experiment. He is particularly compelled by questions of inequality and violence and of the future of human freedom and form in the face of rapid technological mutation. For a beginning, see his first book Radical Equality (2015). Most recently, see After Cruelty (2025), both published by Stanford University Press.

Two distinct sets of philosophical preoccupations shape Dr. Kumar's thinking and writing. The first concerns the moral psychological questions raised by the history of liberalism and law and shaped by the vicissitudes of citizenship and rights in the Global South, especially refracted through the figure of the "South", the "American South" in particular. The second engages the relationship between epistemology and politics; that is, the nature of truth, identity, and faith as they are transformed by human aspirations, conflict, and disappointments.

Dr. Kumar believes the postwar university is a singular institution where these ideas are now being stress-tested and which now demand the work of sustained reinvention. His teaching and research are animated by the belief that the modern university must combine specialized research of greatest rigor with a commitment to widest possible access to the defining ideas that are shaping our century. Along these vectors, his writings on liberalism and cruelty, technology and planetary neglect, the struggles around constitutions and civil rights, and the structure of political violence and democratic distrust in the neoliberal world have appeared widely in both print and digital media. ​

In Fall 2025, Dr. Kumar returns to Stanford University as Resident Fellow of Wilbur Hall to strengthen his engagement with undergraduate education and to deepen his understanding of how we might regenerate liberal education in the face of contemporary and future challenges. ​He has also served as The Teagle Foundation Fellow of the National Forum for the Future of Liberal Education.

You can hear Dr. Kumar on his podcast Mutant: Dialogues at the End of Democracy (2023-2025), now in preparation as a two-volume study under the title After Freedom: Moral Lessons on Justice from the Edges of Democracy.

RADICAL EQUALITY

Radical Equality Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015; New Delhi: Navayana, 2019).

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APPOINTMENTS AND RECOGNITIONS


  • Professor of History of Political Thought and of American Institutions, College of Arts, Letters and Social Sciences (CLASS), Cal Poly Pomona (2025-).
  • Associate Professor of History, College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), Cal Poly Pomona (2022-2025).
  • Director, The Democracy Institute, Cal Poly Pomona (2024-).
  • Director, Ahimsa Center for Political Nonviolence, Cal Poly Pomona (2022-).
  • Professor of History of Consciousness, UC-Santa Cruz (2019-2020).
  • Director, Majors Program in History, Philosophy and the Arts (2012-2016).
  • Assistant Professor of History and Global Political Thought, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University (2007-2018).

  • Executive Board, Leading in Liberal Education, The Teagle Foundation (2025-).
  • Executive Board, Institute for New Global Politics, Redwood City (2021-).
  • Working Group on International Order, Hoover Institution, Stanford University (2018-2019).
  • Research Group on Human Rights, Constitutional Politics, and Religious Diversity, Lichtenberg Kolleg: Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study, Germany (2017-2018).
  • Research Group on Global Histories of Enlightenment, Lichtenberg Kolleg: Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study, Germany (2013-2014).
  • Committee on Historical Teleology, University of Helsinki, Finland (2011- 2014).
  • Working Group on History and Government, Stanford Humanities Center (2009-2010). 

  • Research Award for The Neodemocratic Condition: Freedom and Violence after Liberalism, in collaboration with Yumi Moon (Stanford University) and Robert D. Crews (Stanford University), Academy of Korean Sciences, Ministry of Education, Republic of South Korea (2021-2024). 
  • Rouse Ball Dissertation Award, Trinity College, Cambridge (2006).

  • Senior Fellow, Stanford Global Studies, Stanford University (2020-2022).
  • Fellow, Working Group on International Order, Hoover Institution, Stanford University (2018-2019).
  • Senior Fellow, IWM: Institute of the Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria (2018-2019).
  • Senior Fellow in Human Rights, Constitutional Politics, and Religious Diversity, Lichtenberg Kolleg: Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study, Germany (2017-2018).
  • Senior Fellow, Research Group on Global Histories of Enlightenment, Lichtenberg Kolleg: Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study, Germany (2013-2014).
  • Fellow, National Forum for the Future of Liberal Education, The Teagle Foundation (2009-2014).
  • Associate Fellow, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge University (2007-2013). 
  • Rouse Ball Fellowship in Modern Intellectual History, Trinity College, Cambridge (2006-2007).

RESEARCH


  • The Neodemocratic Condition: Freedom and Violence after Liberalism
    Is aversion to cruelty still the animating moral core of liberalism? This study examines the appearance of a new political form worldwide, created by shifting ideas of sovereign power and fueled by an unprecedented mutation in the modern constitutional vision.​

  • Ambedkar Among the Stars: Political Violence and the Southern Question​
    A philosophical history of human freedom and the temptation to violence that haunts it, this project assembles a new constellation of thinkers as cornerstones of global and Southern political thought. 

  • The Gravity of Truth: Disenchantment, Disappointment, Democracy
    A study on democratic judgment and of the place of truth in politics, which takes as its beginning the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s, leading up to the Obama Presidency and its constitutional aftermath. 

WRITINGS



This book examines the relationship between religious conceptions of freedom and lineages of democratic disobedience in modern anticolonial traditions, with an emphasis on the transformation of theological and liberal notions of authority and the law over the last two centuries. 

COURSES


     HST4433 | Law and Nonviolence: A Moral History

     HST4431 | What is Freedom? Law, Life, and Liberty (Topics in World Civilizations)

     HST3340 | The Faces of Freedom: American Institutions and Ideals 

      HST3340 | The Faces of Freedom (The GIFT Project Core Seminar)

      HST2240 | The Faces of Freedom (The GIFT Project Gateway Seminar)*

      HST3364 | The Faces of Inequality: Power, Prejudice, and Punishment*

      HST4000 | Special Topics in Global Political Thought


     *Not open for enrollment 2026-2027. For more information, email democracy@cpp.edu

      HST4490 | What is Justice? History of an Idea*

      HST3366 | Liberalism and Its Discontents*

      HST3384 | The Human Condition: Hannah Arendt in Her Time and Ours*
 

     *Not open for enrollment 2026-2027. For more information, email democracy@cpp.edu

MEDIA