Deepika Padmanabhan

Deepika Padmanabhan joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia for the 2026-2027 academic year. She is a political scientist whose research examines nationalism, language politics, and self-determination, with a regional focus on South Asia. 

Her book project explores how nation-building unfolds not only through grand policies and formal institutions, but also from the ground up, in everyday life. It examines how states promote national languages through routine, informal interactions with citizens, a process she terms the Everyday Imposition of language.

More broadly, her research explores how everyday practices shape political identities and collective belonging. In related projects, she examines the politics of language, food, film, and symbolic rituals as sites through which nationalism is cultivated, contested, and reproduced in daily life.

At the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Deepika will revise her book manuscript and develop additional projects on nationalism and political behavior. 

She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2025. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and master’s degrees from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the Department of Politics at New York University.