Biography
Edward Anderson is the Smuts Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at Centre of South Asian Studies, and Teaching Associate at POLIS. He is a Postdoctoral Affiliate at Trinity College. Edward has a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge, an MA in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, and a BA(Hons) in Politics and Philosophy from the University of Leeds. He is on the Executive Council of the British Association of South Asian Studies, a founder-member of the Cambridge Migration Research Network (CAMMIGRES) Postgraduate and Early Career Forum Organising Group, and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.
Research
Dr Anderson’s research interests relate to Indian politics and contemporary history, diasporas and migration, nationalism, multiculturalism, cultural hybridity, and transnational networks. His multidisciplinary research focuses on Hindu and Hindu nationalist organisations in Britain, and elsewhere in the Indian diaspora, from the 1960s to the present day. He traces the development of conservative Hindu identities, political ideologies, and ‘long-distance’ nationalisms. This research sheds light on dynamic and deep-rooted transnational networks. His PhD research, which is currently being developed into a monograph on diasporic Hindu nationalism, also analysed public representations of Hinduism and layers of interconnectivity with India. A paper published in Contemporary South Asia (CSA) in 2015 identified the emergence of ‘neo-Hindutva’ – a paradigm that will be explored in more depth in a forthcoming, co-edited CSA special issue.
