Chandni Desai

Assistant professor, Education, University of Toronto
Chandni Desai is an Assistant Professor in the Critical Studies of Equity and Solidarity at the University of Toronto (with a graduate appointment to Women and Gender Studies). Her areas of research, teaching and supervision include: comparative settler colonialisms, Palestine studies, the politics of the Middle East, state violence (carceral politics, militarism and war), cultures of resistance and revolution, political economy, third world internationalism, solidarity, memory, oral history, anti-racism and feminism.

Dr. Desai is working on her first book Revolutionary Circuits of Liberation: The Radical Tradition of Palestinian Resistance Culture and Internationalism. In it she excavates the history of the radical tradition of Palestinian resistance culture, specifically the cultural institutions, archives and radical arts practices established by Palestinian revolutionaries in the PLO. She maps the circulation of resistance culture across geographies in the 20th and 21st century; unearths the legacy of anti-colonial and internationalist cultural production, thought, consciousness and praxis against settler colonial dispossession, imperialism, warfare and genocide; and attempts to trace displaced, lost, stolen and captive Palestinian material culture.

Dr. Desai is the principal investigator on a Social Science and Humanities and Research Council Insight Development Grant (SSHRC IDG) for her project “Transnational Cultural Solidarities: Afro-Asian Pasts, Present and Futures” (2021-2023). In 2020 her research on “Tracing Legacies: Afro-Asian Transnationalism during Third World Decolonization and the Cold War”was selected for the Jackman Humanities Scholars in Residence.

Dr. Desai hosts the Liberation Pedagogy Podcast, a site to learn about the praxis of political struggle, revolution and internationalism in the quest towards freedom making. Another pedagogical innovation she is currently working on is teaching with anti-colonial archives (with Dr. Rafeef Ziadah). Desai was the receipt of the 2019-2020 June Larkin Pedagogy Award for her work on liberation pedagogies, the 2021 Ragini Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award and CCGSE Mentorship Award.