About Vatsal Naresh

Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard. Vatsal’s research interests span democratic theory, political violence, realism, and constitutionalism in 19th and 20th century South Asian, Afro-modern, and European political thought. His current book project, Democracy’s Violence, offers a new interpretation of Alexis de Tocqueville, W. E. B. Du Bois, B. R. Ambedkar, and Hannah Arendt’s writings on majorities, identities, and collective violence. Vatsal’s publications include Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism: India, Pakistan, and Turkey (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018). Before completing his PhD in Political Science at Yale in 2022, Vatsal studied History at Delhi University and Political Science at Columbia University; and worked as a graduate researcher at the Center for Democracy, Toleration, and Religion, in New York City.

Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. He is the editor of Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018).

NBN Episodes hosted by Vatsal:

Rama Sundari Mantena, "Provincial Democracy: Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire in Twentieth-century South India" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

August 20, 2024

Provincial Democracy

Rama Sundari Mantena
Hosted by Vatsal Naresh

Provincial Democracy: Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire in Twentieth-century South India (Cambridge UP, 2023) delves into the period between …

Samuel Ely Bagg, "The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)

August 7, 2024

The Dispersion of Power

Samuel Ely Bagg
Hosted by Vatsal Naresh

This year, many countries around the world, including most of the world's most populous democracies, have consequential nation-wide elections. In many…

Aziz Rana, "The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

June 19, 2024

The Constitutional Bind

Aziz Rana
Hosted by Vatsal Naresh

In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-c…