Affiliated Faculty

<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Rajbir Singh Judge is Associate Professor of History and Associate Member of Asian and Asian American Studies at California State University, Long Beach. An intellectual and cultural historian of South Asia, he works at the intersection of Sikh tradition, postcolonial thought, and critical theory, with a particular focus on questions of sovereignty, loss, and the writing of history in colonial and late colonial Panjab.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Judge's first book, <strong><em>Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia</em> </strong>(Columbia University Press, 2024), was awarded Best First Book in the History of Religions by the American Academy of Religion. The book takes up Maharaja Duleep Singh and his failed attempt in the 1880s to restore Sikh sovereignty after the British annexation of the Sikh kingdom, but it is not principally a political narrative. Judge examines how Sikhs engaged military, political, and psychological loss through theological debate, literary production, bodily discipline, and ethical practice, arguing that the community was not simply seeking to recuperate the past but to remake it — and to dwell within loss rather than transcend it. The book brings Sikh tradition into conversation with psychoanalysis and postcolonial thought, drawing endorsements from scholars including Talal Asad and Gil Anidjar.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">His journal articles appear in leading venues across intellectual history, critical theory, and South Asian studies. "There is No Colonial Relationship: Antagonism, Sikhism, and South Asian Studies" (<strong><em>History & Theory</em></strong>, 2018) intervenes in debates about how Sikh Studies is positioned within the broader field of South Asian scholarship. "Reform in Fragments: Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition in the Late 19th Century" (<strong><em>Modern Asian Studies</em></strong>, 2022) examines fragmentary sovereignty claims in the late colonial Sikh tradition. "Birha: Approaching a Poetics Beyond the Human" (<strong><em>Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East</em></strong>, 2022) engages Panjabi poetics and non-human ontologies. "The Construction of Dangerous Boundaries" (<strong><em>Sikh Research Journal</em></strong>, 2022) addresses the politics of boundary-making in Sikh contexts. "Critique of Archived Life: Toward a Hesitation of Sikh Immigrant Accumulation" (with Jasdeep Singh Brar, <strong><em>positions: asia critique</em></strong>, 2021) examines Sikh migration and the archive. "The Invisible Hand of the Indic" (<strong><em>Cultural Critique</em></strong>, 2021) takes up the politics of Indic categories in colonial and postcolonial thought.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Judge has also co-edited two special journal issues: "Other than Human: Rethinking Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia" (with Parama Roy, <strong><em>Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East</em></strong>, 2022) and "The Destruction of Loss" (with Basit Iqbal, <strong><em>Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory</em>)</strong>. Additional publications include "Formations of the Corridor: A Border Christology" (<strong><em>Theory & Event</em></strong>, 2022) and "Dusky Countenances: Ambivalent Bodies and Desires in the Theosophical Society" (<strong><em>Journal of the History of Sexuality</em></strong>, 2018). His review essays have appeared in the <strong><em>Journal of the American Academy of Religion</em></strong> and <strong><em>qui parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences</em></strong>.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Judge is currently at work on his second book, <strong><em>A Critique of Contextual Reason</em></strong>, for which he was awarded a membership in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, during the 2024–2025 academic year. Prior to joining CSU Long Beach in 2020, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University (2018–2020).</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Judge received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis in 2018, his M.A. from UC Davis in 2012, and his B.A. from California State University, Chico in 2010, where he completed three majors in History, Religious Studies, and Philosophy. He is a first-generation college student from a Sikh migrant farmworker family in California's Central Valley.</p>

The intellectual and cultural history of colonial and late colonial Panjab, with emphasis on sovereignty, loss, and the Sikh tradition. Postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, and the writing of history. Maharaja Duleep Singh and nineteenth-century Sikh political and theological imagination. Sikh migration and the colonial archive. The politics of Indic categories in South Asian studies.