Teaching
Academic Programmes
5-Year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.)
3-Year LL.B. (Hons.)
Master's Programme in Public Policy
Courses
Mar 2024
Nov 2023
July 2023
Mar 2023
Education
- BA, LLB (Hons), National Law University Delhi
- LLM, National Law University Delhi
- BCL, University of Oxford
- MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge
- PhD in History and Political Thought, University of Cambridge
Profile
Salmoli has taught law, history, and politics at NLU Delhi and the University of Cambridge. Before embarking on an academic career, she practiced civil and commercial matters as a lawyer associated with Amarchand Mangaldas-Delhi.
Salmoli is an intellectual historian of legal and political concepts that have defined the modern and contemporary world. Her work specifically focusses on how the ideas of sovereignty, freedom and law were remade in the global South Asia by anticolonial figures who innovated ideologies defying received wisdom. She successfully completed her doctoral dissertation on the reimgaination of freedom by Rabindranath Tagore, modern India’s foremost poet-philosopher. Beyond the liberal and nationalist canons, Salmoli interprets Tagore’s freedom as the human capacity of world-making which could only be found in collective action. Her present and upcoming work is on the role of institutions in Hindu political thought centering on state, nation and party.
Her areas of interest include constitutional theory, public law, intellectual history and global political thought.
Publications
Journal publications:
Salmoli Choudhuri (2023). “Sovereignty before Law.” Global Intellectual History, DOI: 10.1080/23801883.2023.2269490 (co-authored).
Salmoli Choudhuri (2023). “A Case for Humanistic Theory.” Economic and Political Weekly Vol 58, No. 39, 69-72 (https://www.epw.in/journal/2023/39/discussion/case-humanistic-theory.html) (co-authored).
Salmoli Choudhuri (2023). “Beyond Friend and Enemy: The Stranger as a Political Category in Colonial Modernity.” The Indian Yearbook of Comparative Law (co-authored).
Salmoli Choudhuri (2021). “Theology of the “Absent King” and the Possibility of Rabindranath Tagore’s Political Thought.” Political Theology Vol 23, Issue 1-2: 44-58, https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2021.2017537.
Salmoli Choudhuri (2021). “Book Review: Imre Bangha (Ed.) Tagore. Beyond His Language.” South Asia Research Vol 41, No. 3: 440–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/02627280211034676.
Salmoli Choudhuri (2021). “Gender conflict over temple entry and the limits of legalizing identity politics in contemporary India.” Political Theology Network (https://politicaltheology.com/gender-conflict-over-temple-entry-and-the-limits-of-legalizing-identity-politics-in-contemporary-india/) (co-authored).
Salmoli Choudhuri (2016). “Ambedkar’s Liberty Concept in Comparative Constitutional Thought.” The Indian Yearbook of Comparative Law (co-authored).
Other publications:
Short commentaries and blog pieces:
“Where is the Public in the Republic of India” (https://www.nls.ac.in/blog/where-is-the-public-in-the-republic-of-india/, February 16, 2024)
https://thewire.in/politics/does-todays-india-need-decolonisation-speak (August 25, 2023)
https://thewire.in/politics/bengal-assembly-polls-tmc-bjp-bhadralok-hindutva (April 6, 2021)
https://thewire.in/law/supreme-court-ayodhya-judgement-hindutva-sovereignty (November 18, 2019)
https://thewire.in/law/instant-triple-talaq-right-to-privacy-individual-community (October 25, 2017)