This fall, we are excited to welcome several new full-time faculty members to The Cooper Union’s academic programs. As part of a series introducing this new faculty cohort to our wider community, we spoke to Ninad Pandit who first arrived at Cooper as a postdoctoral fellow and joins the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences full-time this year as assistant professor of history. Pandit, who has previously taught at Yale University and the London School of Economics, received his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University and holds degrees in urban planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in architecture from Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and Environmental Studies, Mumbai University.

Tell us about your research interests.

I’m a historian of colonialism, cities, and politics. Besides my Ph.D. in history, I also hold professional degrees in architecture and urban planning, so my research and writing draws on this interdisciplinary education. My work examines the emergence of progressive socialist movements in urban colonial contexts. My current book project, titled The Bombay Radicals, explains how the industrial workers of colonial Bombay translated ideas of socialism and communism into their colonial context to organize one of the largest anticolonial communist social movements in the world. Besides this project, I’m also deeply interested in autobiography as a form of history-writing and self-representation, and I’m currently working on a history of Bombay in the 1980s–1990s written with an autobiographical voice.

What brought you to The Cooper Union?

I first heard about The Cooper Union when I was studying architecture in Bombay. My teachers were deeply influenced by John Hejduk’s pedagogy, so The Cooper Union has always been a kind of magical institution in my mind. You can imagine what a thrilling moment it must have been when I first came to Cooper—as a postdoctoral fellow—some years ago, and the magic remains just as strong! I feel a great affinity toward Cooper’s commitment to free education and its historic role as an institution in New York City, and I am a firm believer in the interdisciplinary pedagogy that we have developed here. I teach core and elective courses in HSS, but my training in architecture has given me opportunities to collaborate with and teach in the School of Architecture too. I’ve been able to work closely with some incredibly talented colleagues and students, and I’m excited to continue this work as a member of the full-time faculty.

What aspects of teaching are you most excited about in the coming academic year at Cooper?

I’m teaching HSS3 in the Fall, a course that I have been leading since 2021. This course has been at the heart of my own contribution to the work of decolonizing our teaching at Cooper, and I’m really looking forward to working with new and old colleagues for this course. I’m also thrilled to be co-teaching a new architecture elective course called Public Art as Alimentary Infrastructure with Professor Nora Akawi from the School of Architecture and Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa from the Storefront for Art and Architecture. In the spring, I plan to teach a new elective on the role of large-infrastructures like dams and hydroelectric projects in the politics of post-colonial nation-building. I’m really looking forward to the start of the academic year!