Nikita Dhawan

Nikita Dhawan, born in Thane/India, is professor of political science and gender studies at the University of Giessen/Germany. She graduated from Ruhr-University Bochum/Germany with a PhD in philosophy in 2006. From 2008 to 2014, Dhawan was junior professor of gender and postcolonial studies and director of the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies (FRCPS) at the Goethe University Frankfurt and, from 2014 to 2018, she was professor of political theory and gender studies and director of the research platform Genderstudies: Identities – Discourses – Transformations at the University of Innsbruck/Austria.

Besides this, she was also principal investigator of the cluster of excellence »Development of Normative Order«, as well as member of the directorate of the Cornelia Goethe Center for women’s studies and research of gender relations at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt/Germany. The focus of her studies lies on the historical, economic, sociopolitical and cultural interrelations of Europe and the postcolonial world. She has visited fellowships at Universidad de Costa Rica, the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at The University of Melbourne/Australia, the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California/USA, University of La Laguna Tenerife/Spain, Pusan National University South Korea and Columbia University New York/USA.

She has published numerous articles and books such as Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence in 2007 over Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (ed., 2014), Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische Einführung (2015), Global Justice and Desire: Queering Economy (co-ed., 2015) and Negotiating Normativity: Postcolonial Appropriations, Contestations and Transformations (co-ed., 2016) to Difference that makes no Difference: The Non-Performativity of Intersectionality and Diversity (ed., 2017).

Nikita Dhawan has received the Käthe Leichter Award for outstanding achievements in the pursuit of women’s and gender studies and in support of women’s movement and the achievement of gender equality in 2017.