Department of History - Carnegie Mellon University

Faculty

Nico Slate

Rank: Assistant Professor
Ph.D.: Harvard University, 2009
Department Member Since: 2009

Nico Slate’s research and teaching focus on the transnational history of social movements in the United States, with a particular emphasis on South Asia and on the history of struggles against racism and imperialism worldwide. His current book project, Reflections of Freedom: Race, Caste, and the Shared Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India, argues that South Asians and African Americans learned from each other in ways that not only advanced their respective struggles for freedom, but also helped define what freedom could and should mean.

By expressing solidarity across racial and national borders, African Americans and South Asians challenged prevailing conceptions of race and nation, as well as of class, caste, and gender. The diversity of “freedom struggles” within India and among African Americans meant that multiple analogies, often contradictory, vied to juxtapose and represent “the Indian,” “the Negro,” or “the Untouchable.” These analogies, always political, increasingly became enmeshed in global power politics, especially during the Second World War and the Cold War. The interconnection of Indian and African American freedom struggles bridged the worlds of international diplomacy and grassroots social change, demonstrating that local history and global history need to be studied together.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in California's Mojave Desert, Dr. Slate earned degrees in Earth Systems and the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities from Stanford University and in Environmental Change and Management from Oxford University before completing his Ph.D. in History at Harvard University. He maintains broad interests in the intersection of literature, philosophy, politics, and history, with particular interests in the history of race and caste, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, anti-colonial and post-colonial nationalisms, environmental science and politics, the Second World War, the Cold War, and nonviolent civil disobedience.

Publications

“A Coloured Cosmopolitanism: Cedric Dover’s Reading of the Afro-Asian World,” in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, editors. Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

“‘I am a coloured woman’: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya in the United States, 1939-41,” Contemporary South Asia 17, no. 1 (March 2009): 7-19.

“Rozzell Sykes,” in The African American National Biography, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, editors (Oxford University Press, 2008).

“The Mahatma Gandhi Memorial,” Exhibition Review, The Journal of American History 93 (Dec. 2006), 830-833.