Ninad Pandit, Assistant Professor of History, 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.

Currently, Ninad is completing The Bombay Radicals, a book under contract with Cambridge University Press that tells the story of the origins of the working-class movement and the Left in colonial Bombay. The book traces a cohort of organizers who moved from nationalism to communism and shows how they adapted socialist ideas through trade unions, vernacular political writing, reading groups, strikes, and street mobilization. It argues that socialist and communist politics in India were shaped not simply through international networks but through local struggles over labor, caste, language, and nationalism. It also examines how the expansion of nationalist mass politics in the 1930s weakened popular support for the Left, prompting communist organizers to turn increasingly toward Marathi linguistic politics. Finally, the book shows how this turn helped reconfigure working-class identity and contributed to Bombay’s later transformation from a center of radical labor politics into a stronghold of nativist politics.

At the Cooper Union, Ninad teaches courses on the history of the modern world in the HSS Core Curriculum and electives on urban histories, migration, and empire. He also serves as Director of Academic Advising for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He teaches electives in the School of Architecture and has taught in its History Core. 

Ninad received his PhD from the Department of History at Princeton University. He also holds professional degrees in City Planning and Design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in Architecture from the University of Mumbai. He was previously the Singh Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University, and a Mellon Fellow in Cities and the Humanities at LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science.