Uday’s research and teaching focusses on the question of education and the promises and limits it holds in the collective pursuit of freedom. His dissertation “From the Abolition of Untouchability to a Philosophy of Liberatory Education: B. R. Ambedkar and W.E.B. Du Bois in Dialogue” brings into view the work of two central in the liberatory traditions of South Asian anti-caste political thought and Black political thought to argue that the two struggles were conceptually intertwined, and that their respective insights remain necessary for making possible universal political and social emancipation. He earned his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2023.

Deeply passionate about teaching and writing, Uday’s thinking and praxis as a scholar has been transformed by the feminist tradition across the world. Eve Ewing, Audre Lorde, Tressie McMillan-Cottom, Jenn M. Jackson, Shailaja Paik, V. Geetha, Elena Ferrante, and Vijeta Kumar, amongst many other feminist thinkers and comrades form the community – through their inspiration and intellectual clarity - that make possible his work.

Constantly thinking about the conditions of possibility for love and justice, Uday is also an organizer in the Chicago Mehfil (a Chicago-based South Asian performing arts space open to all and intent on breaking barriers imposed by caste in South Asia); was a proud organizer in the Graduate Student Union in UChicago and remains committed to the cause of worker-organising; and is now working to make visible and scale up the intimate but often invisibilised connection between the anti-caste movement in South Asia and the Black liberation movement the world over.