Faculty

Sandipto Dasgupta is Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research.

His research is in the history of modern political and legal thought, especially the political theory of empire, decolonization, and postcolonial presents. He is the author of Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony, (Cambridge University Press, 2024), which reconstructs the institutionalization of nascent postcolonial futures through a historical study of the Indian constitution making experience. His scholarship was recognized with the 2025 Francine Frankel award by the American Political Science Association, the ICON-S Prize for outstanding book in the field of Public Law by the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S), and the Bernard S. Cohn First Book Prize by the Association for Asian Studies.

Currently, Dasgupta is working on a book on public ownership following decolonization. During 2024-25, Dasgupta was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, in Social Sciences and Historical Studies. Before the New School, he was postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the British Academy.

PhD, Columbia University

Books

Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony (Cambridge University Press, 2024). 

Media

"Inventor of the Future" (on decolonization in Africa), Boston Review, 2025. 

"The American Empire Across the Globe", India Forum, 2023. 

Quoted in "How Have Artists Shaped Previous Protest Movements?" artnet news, June 16, 2020.

"The Fight for India's Democracy, From the University to the Streets," The Wire, 2020.

"NSSR Welcomes Political Theorist Sandipto Dasgupta," Research Matters, 2019.