Dr Karthick Ram Manoharan
Karthick Ram Manoharan, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at National Law School of India University, will be joining the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge as Smuts Visiting Research Fellow in October 2025.
He will be working on the Indian Emergency and its implications for political theory; he is interested in engaging with works of and on Carl Schmitt for this project. His earlier research was on the Indian anti-caste thinker Periyar E.V. Ramasamy. He was Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton working on the research project “Freedom from Caste: The Political Thought of Periyar E.V. Ramasamy in a Global Context” funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. He received his PhD from the University of Essex in 2015 and his thesis was on the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon. He is the author of Periyar: A Study in Political Atheism (2022) and Frantz Fanon: Identity and Resistance (2019), and the co-editor of the volumes The Cambridge Companion to Periyar (2025) and Rethinking Social Justice (2020). In sum, he likes to work on critical political thinkers, pushing their thoughts in unconventional ways.
Select publications
Journal Articles
• 2020 “In the Path of Ambedkar: Periyar and the Dalit Question.” South Asian History and Culture, 11:2, pp. 136-149. https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2020.1755127 [Published Online on 17 April 2020].
• 2020 “Freedom from God: Periyar and Religion.” Religions, 11(1): 10. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11010010 [Published Online on 24 December 2019].
• 2019 “Counter-media: TamilNet and the Creation of Metanarratives from Below.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 33:3, pp. 386-400. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2019.1591340 [Published Online on 17 March 2019].
• 2017 “Anti-Casteist Casteism? A Fanonist Critique of Ramasamy’s Discourse on Caste.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 19:1, pp. 73-90. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2016.1142885 [Published Online on 11 February 2016].
Monographs
• 2022 Periyar: A Study in Political Atheism. Orient BlackSwan.
• 2019 Frantz Fanon: Identity and Resistance. Orient BlackSwan.
Edited Volumes
• 2025 The Cambridge Companion to Periyar. Eds. A.R. Venkatachalapathy and Karthick Ram Manoharan. Cambridge University Press.
• 2020 Rethinking Social Justice. Eds. S. Anandhi, Karthick Ram Manoharan et al. Orient BlackSwan.
Select awards
- 2024 Recipient of research grant from UGC-DAAD funded project on ‘Law and Transformations’ as part of the Indo-German Partnership in Higher Education.
- 2023 Bliss Carnochan International Visitor at Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University.
- 2020-2022 Recipient of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship hosted at UoW for the project “Freedom from Caste: The Political Thought of Periyar E.V. Ramasamy in a Global Context.”
- 2011-2014 Recipient of the University of Essex Scholarship.
