Mohan Ambikaipaker

Ph.D., University of Texas - Austin
Associate Professor & Associate Director, World Cultures and Literatures Program

Department of Modern and Classical Languages
mambikai@Central.UH.EDU 

Biographical Summary

Mohan Ambikaipaker is Associate Director and Associate Professor in the World Cultures and Literatures program at the University of Houston. He is the author of Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, Ethnography of Political Violence series). The monograph is an ethnographic study of the entanglements and lived experiences of racial and state violence among South Asians and African Caribbean people in London. He hascontributed a chapter to the recently released Antiblackness, edited by João Costa Vargas and Moon-Kie Jung (Duke University Press, 2021) and also Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia: A Cultural Studies Perspective, edited by Zawawi Ibrahim, Gareth Richards and Victor King (Singapore: Springer, 2022). He has also published in journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Communication, Culture and Critique, Journal for Intercultural Studies and Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies. He is currently on the Ford Foundation's convening panel for the The Global Impacts of Anti-Blackness project.

Dr. Ambikaipaker’s research and teaching is comprised of three strands (U.K., U.S. and Malaysia) and engages comparative research in theorizing connections between liberal-democratic political systems and the interlocking production of differential forms of racism. He also researches and publishes in the field of critical university studies, utilizing autoethnography and counter storytelling to critically examine the experiences of contemporary diversity discourse in U.S. higher education. His expertise has resulted in international media appearances, including as a featured speaker in the Emmy-nominated PBS show, Blackademics and as a commentator for the Malaysian current affairs program Consider This.

Current areas of interest in Anthropology: anthropology of race and modernity, global antiblackness, African and South Asian diasporas, activist anthropology, auto-ethnography, critical university studies.