Ninad Pandit, Assistant Professor of History, is an architect, urban planner and a historian of modern South Asia. He is also an Affiliated Faculty in the Cooper Union’s School of Architecture. His scholarship examines the relationships between urbanization, industrialization and the emergence of radical politics in colonial India. 

Currently, Ninad is working on The Bombay Radicals, a book project that tells the story of the origins of the working-class movement and the Left in colonial western India and argues that the process of translating ideas of communism and mass mobilization for use in colonial contexts produced new knowledge about organizing workers and developed new strategies for unionizing, striking, and providing strike relief. It also argues that this knowledge was critical in developing a new kind of mass politics in colonial India, one that shaped popular mobilizations led by M. K. Gandhi in the 1930s and 1940s. Finally, the book shows how the rise of Gandhi’s nationalist urban mass mobilizations led to a decline in the popular support for the Left, ultimately paving the way for a new, right-wing, xenophobic political campaign.

At the Cooper Union, Ninad teaches courses on the history of the modern world in the HSS Core Curriculum and electives on urban histories and migration in the global south. He also teaches in the School of Architecture’s History Core and occasionally offers Architecture electives. 

Ninad received his PhD from the Department of History at Princeton University. He also holds professional degrees in City Planning/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.