Rohan Chopra

Rohan was admitted to Harvard’s PhD programme in History in 2025. His interdisciplinary work spans global intellectual history, historical international relations and theory from the South. He is interested in using historical methods beyond studying archives, including, but not limited to walking, imagination and everyday encounters in order to excavate ways of being and knowing that transgress the intellectual worlds of Western modernity. At Harvard, he wishes to explore how intellectuals and revolutionaries in the early twentieth century conceived non-national, anti-hierarchical futures that responded to the threats of minoritisation and colonial modernity. He hopes to study how these actors drew on prior epistemic systems, combining them with contemporary political movements in the pre-World War 1 period, a dialectic through which they conceived and effected utopias for their futures through their pasts in their presents.

Much of his prior work has focused on the social and intellectual history of early colonial Delhi, especially the reshaping of Delhi’s cultural and social life following the British response to the 1857 Rebellion, but equally, resistance to it. His academic work has been published in Millennium, Columbia Journal of Asia and Global Histories and he has presented his work at Oxford’s Global and Imperial History workshop, history of emotions workshop at Cambridge, the Annual Millennium Symposium at LSE and the LSE’s Inequalities Institute, among others. He has also written for popular platforms, including the Scroll, Newslaundry, the Print and the People’s Archive of Rural India.

Before joining Harvard, Rohan completed a Master’s in Modern South Asian Studies (Distinction) at Oxford, where he was a Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Trust Scholar. His dissertation studied an early 19th century travelogue from early colonial Delhi, exploring the distinct forms of inclusion through familiarity that transcended religious, ethnic and national modes of belonging. This received the Barbara Harris-White Thesis Prize at Oxford. Prior to that, he graduated summa cum laude from Ashoka University, where he also received the Sarvepalli Gopal Memorial Book Prize for the best student in modern Indian history and the Best Undergraduate History Thesis award (now published in Millennium). In his free time, Rohan is interested in photography of everyday life (he now has 3 cameras!), reading and learning about cities.