Adi Kumar

Aditya “Adi” Kumar is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Yale University. He is a historian of South Asian America, Asian American social movements, and the United States in the World. His dissertation, Diaspora Defiant: Indian Americans, the Third World, and the 1975 Emergency, examines 1970s South Asian organizing across North America and is the first full-length study of diasporic mobilization in response to India’s 1975 Emergency. Drawing on institutional (state and university) archives, community ephemera, private papers, and 44 interviews with former anti-Emergency organizers, Diaspora Defiant identifies and traces the development of 48 distinct South Asian American organizations across 20 North American cities. Kumar’s work charts critical interventions in Global American Studies, Asian American Studies, and South Asian American historiography. On campus, Kumar leads several student mentorship and digital humanities initiatives and serves as Graduate Coordinator for Yale’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. He received his B.A. in History (Honors) and Political Science from Brown University in 2017.