Nandini Dey is a WCED Postdoctoral Fellow for 2023–2025. Her research interests include borders, migration, colonialism, international studies, and citizenship. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2023. Her research has been funded by the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant along with other fellowships. She has taught classes in International Relations, Comparative Politics, and on Migration and Citizenship.
Nandini is currently preparing a book manuscript that builds on her dissertation research. In this, she examines imperial migration control, focussing largely on the British Empire in South Asia and beyond to unearth the foundations of border controls and security measures that today surveil the vast majority of people and goods crossing international borders. Importantly, her research highlights how both internal (domestic) and external (international) factors shaped who came to be perceived as a security threat and how such perceptions came to characterize not only outsiders or non-citizens, but also insiders, including legal citizens of a state. In the British Empire, for instance, Indians both within and outside the empire—from Natal to the Western United States and from Eastern Europe to Fiji—and their real or alleged connections to Britain’s enemies at the time, primarily Germany, Turkey, and Bolshevik Russia, came to embody the security threat embedded in the racialized colonial migration-control regime. These embedded security perceptions based on national, transnational, or in-group loyalties persisted in postcolonial citizenship regimes and provided the basis for securitization, criminalization, and even exclusion of targeted groups. Her work thus examines how the infrastructure of imperial migration control, including passports, stop lists, visa regulations, and immigration checks, has endured and expanded in a post-imperial world order.
As a WCED Postdoctoral Fellow, Nandini will continue work on her book manuscript and expand her research on imperial and post-imperial migration controls and regulations of citizenship. In addition, she plans to conduct new research that will center climate change and its effects on borders and migration, in South Asia and beyond. It will examine how international borders are conceptualized and incorporated in climate policy and its implementation as well as the effect of climate-related displacement on border and migration controls.
Education
- Ph.D., Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, 2023
- M.A., Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, 2019
- M.Sc., History, University of Edinburgh, 2014
- B.A., Political Science, University of Delhi, 2013
Grants and Honors
- Provost’s Office COVID Relief Dissertation Completion Fellowship (Summer), Johns Hopkins University (2023)
- Joel Steward Ish Fellowship, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University (2022)
- Malcolm H. Laucheimer Fellowship, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University (2021)
- Dean’s Teaching Fellowship, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University (2021)
- APSA–NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (2020)
- Nicole Suveges Fieldwork Fellowship, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University (2020)
- Scholar, Public Scholarship Program, American Political Science Association (2019)
