Neel Thakkar

Visiting Scholar

Neel Thakkar is a historian of development, planning, and indigeneity in modern South Asia. He currently teaches South Asian history at Fordham University. He was, most recently, a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. He received his PhD from Princeton University, and MA and BA from Stanford University. He is currently at work on his first book, Crucible of Development: Making an Industrial Region in India’s Adivasi Heartland, 1920-1975. His research has been published in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. His work has been supported by external grants from the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Beinecke Scholarship, and the American Institute for Indian Studies, among others.

Photo by Sameer Khan/Photobuddy LLC.

Participating Years

2026–2027

Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.