Affiliated Faculty

<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair is Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures and holder of the Tara Singh and Balwant Kaur Chattha, Gurbax Singh and Kirpal Kaur Brar Endowed Chair in Sikh Studies at the University of Michigan. His career is distinguished by a remarkable intellectual trajectory spanning the natural sciences and the humanities.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Mandair's early academic life was rooted in applied chemistry. He earned a B.Sc. with First Class Honours and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Aston University in the UK, specializing in solid-state NMR spectroscopy and silicate chemistry. After publishing in leading chemistry journals and working for multinationals including Akzo Nobel and Courtaulds, he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Warwick's Department of Physics, researching superconductors.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">It was during this fellowship that Mandair's engagement with human rights activism in Punjab catalyzed a decisive shift toward the humanities. He retrained at Warwick, completing an MA in Philosophy with Distinction and a British Academy–funded Ph.D. supervised jointly by Professor Martin Warner (Warwick) and Professor Christopher Shackle (SOAS, University of London). His doctoral dissertation, <em><strong>Thinking Between Cultures: Metaphysics and Cultural Translation</strong></em>, laid the groundwork for a new approach to Sikh philosophy at the intersection of postcolonial theory, translation studies, and the colonial history of Punjab.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">After a postdoctoral fellowship at SOAS and holding the S.K.K. Bindra Chair in Sikh Studies at Hofstra University, Mandair joined the University of Michigan in 2006. His major works include <strong><em>Religion and the Specter of the West</em></strong>(Columbia, 2009), <strong><em>Secularism and Religion-Making</em> </strong>(Oxford, 2011), <strong><em>Sikhism: A Guide for the Perplexed</em> </strong>(Bloomsbury, 2013), <strong><em>Violence and the Sikhs</em></strong> (Cambridge, 2022), and <strong><em>Sikh Philosophy</em></strong> (Bloomsbury, 2022). Since 2005, he has served as lead editor of <strong><em>Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture and Theory</em></strong>, the leading scholarly journal in Sikh studies.</p>

Mandair's current research explores the intersections of world philosophies, consciousness studies, political theology, and science and technology studies, drawing on his rare combination of training in both the sciences and humanities. His forthcoming Geophilosophical Encounters investigates new modes of cross-cultural philosophical encounter beyond conventional comparative frameworks — work rooted in his lived experience as a diasporic British Sikh.