Adi Kumar will continue work on his dissertation, “Diaspora Defiant: Indian Americans, the Third World, and the 1975 Emergency,” which traces 1970s Indian and South Asian organizing across more than twenty North American cities, uncovering forty-eight distinct organizations through multi-sited archival research and oral interviews with former South Asian American organizers from the Third World Left to the Hindu Right. His work demonstrates how these anti-Emergency movements operated in proximity to, yet often independently from, the Asian American Movement, complicating canonical accounts of panethnicity in Asian American historiography. By situating diaspora-state relations alongside Cold War geopolitics and the disintegration of the Indian Left, Kumar repositions South Asian activism within broader histories of Third World internationalism and Asian American radicalism.

Adi Kumar is a seventh-year PhD candidate in history at Yale University. He has led digital humanities projects on Asian American activism and Third World movements, and serves as Graduate Coordinator for Yale’s Mellon Mays Fellowship. Kumar earned his BA in history (Honors) and political science from Brown University in 2017.