Ronak K. Kapadia, PhD

Ronak K. Kapadia is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and curator whose work traces the aesthetic and material life of US empire and its violent afterlives, asking how minoritarian art makes those histories perceptible while creating other ways of sensing, knowing, and sustaining life. He is Associate Professor and Director of the Interdepartmental Graduate Concentration in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, with affiliations in Art History, Museum and Exhibition Studies, and Global Asian Studies. His award-winning first book, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press, 2019), examines how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic artists confront the visual and sensory regimes of surveillance, detention, drone warfare, and counterinsurgency. Treating aesthetic practice as a form of insurgent knowledge, the book shows how artists contest empire’s claims to see, classify, and predict while cultivating opacity, queer feminist solidarity, and possibilities for life beyond the forever war. Kapadia extended this inquiry through Surviving the Long Wars, a multi-year public humanities and curatorial initiative that brought the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century US Indian Wars into critical relation with the twenty-first-century “Global War on Terror.” As lead project director and co-curator of the 2023 Veteran Art Triennial and Summit and lead co-editor of Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire (Bridge Books, 2024), he brought exhibitions, public dialogue, and collaborative scholarship together to approach art as a practice of creative rebellion, demilitarization, and collective survival. He continues this work as senior curatorial advisor for the 2026 Veteran Art Triennial.

His current book, Breathing in Common: Minoritarian Art and the Respiratory Commons, examines how queer, trans, and disabled artists of color make the unequal conditions of breathable life perceptible amid war, pandemic, ecological crisis, and chronic illness. The book develops the “respiratory commons” to name the shared yet violently unequal infrastructures through which breath is sustained and depleted, showing how art preserves embodied histories, contests dominant accounts of crisis and recovery, and opens onto other, more beautiful and arresting ways of living in common. Across his scholarship, curatorial practice, and public humanities work, Kapadia has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, among others, as well as honors including the Surveillance Studies Network Book Prize, UIC Scholar of the Year Award – Rising Star in Humanities, Arts, Design, and Architecture, and UIC Silver Circle Award for Teaching Excellence.

Selected Books and Publications

• Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire, co-edited with Aaron Hughes, Therese Quinn, Meranda Roberts, and Amber Zora (Bridge Books, 2024)
• "The Downward Redistribution of Breath: Abolitionist Visions of Healing Justice from Chicago.” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 8, no. 3 (January 2024): 259-284.
• “Outside, Looking In: Alternative Legacies and Futures for Surveillance Studies,” co-authored with Toby Beauchamp. Surveillance & Society 20, no. 4 (2022): 406-412.
• “The Galactic Potential of Queer Muslim Futurism: Listening for the Leninist Echo in Planet 65,” Art Catalog Essay of Karachi-Based Artist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s film series and multimedia project ABJD: Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth (San Francisco: Sming Sming Books, 2022): 100-104.
• “On the Afterlives of Forever Wars: Insurgent Aesthetics as a Queer Practice of Freedom.” In “Extraordinary Renditions: The Global Afterlives of 9/11,” ed. Kalyan Nadiminti, special cluster of Post45 Contemporaries (2020).
• “The Queer Sumptuousness of Chitra Ganesh.” Art Review of Brooklyn-Based Artist Chitra Ganesh for The Archive No. 68, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Journal (2020): 53-54.
• Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press, 2019, Art History Publication Initiative Series: 366 pages, 93 illustrations, incl. 26 color plates in a 16 page insert).
• "Kissing the Dead Body: Conjuring 'Warm Data' in Archives of US Global Military Detention." Verge: Studies in Global Asias 5, no. 1 (2019): 123-152. **Honorable Mention, American Studies Association (ASA) Comparative Ethnic Studies Paper Prize**
• "Death by Double-Tap: (Undoing) Racial Logics in the Age of Drone Warfare." In With Stones In Our Hands: Reflections on Muslims, Racism, and Empire, eds. Sohail Daulatzai & Junaid Rana (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018): 201-218.
• "A Queer of Color Killjoy." Review of A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire, by Hiram Pérez. Feminist Formations 29, no. 2 (2017): 226-230.
• Simone Browne, Ronak K. Kapadia, and Katherine McKittrick, eds. "Race, Communities, and Informers." Special issue of Surveillance & Society 15, no. 1 (2017).
• "Up in the Air and On the Skin: Wafaa Bilal, Drone Warfare, and the Human Terrain." In Shifting Borders: America and the Middle East/North Africa, ed. Alex Lubin (Beirut, Lebanon: American University of Beirut Press, 2014): 147-163. Reprinted as: “Up in the Air and On the Skin: Drone Warfare and the Queer Calculus of Pain.” In Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, ed. Nada Elia et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016): 360-375.
• "Sonic Contagions: Bird Flu, Bandung, and the Queer Cartographies of MIA." Journal of Popular Music Studies, 26, nos. 2-3 (2014): 226-250.
• "Artist Collectives in Post-2001 New York: A Conversation with Visible Collective." In "September 11th Commemorative Issue," eds. Rajini Srikanth & Parag Khandar, spec issue of Asian American Literary Review 2, no. 1.5 (2011): 294-318.

Public Scholarship

• Surviving the Long Wars: Visualizing Parallels Between the US “Indian Wars” and the “Global War on Terror,” lead project director and co-curator, public humanities collaboration between the emerging Veteran Art Movement and the Programs in Gender and Women’s Studies / Museum and Exhibition Studies at UIC (2022-2023)
• The Reciprocal Politics of Bed Space Activism: From Confinement to Radical Care, co-organizer of virtual programming series at the nexus of migrant justice, abolition, and disability justice (2020-2022).
• Global Media Cultures Podcast, “Liberation and Contagion in the Music of MIA,” Interview with Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, University of Texas-Dallas, December 8, 2020.
• New Books Network Podcast, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War, Interview with Lakshita Malik of the Mobilities and Methods Lab, September 3, 2020.
• Media Futures Hub Podcast, University of New South Wales, “Drone Futures” Interview with Dr. Michael Richardson, August 2020.
• “In ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace,’ Ryan Murphy Proves Again!—He Can Never Get Race Right,” Quartzy Magazine Interview with Nicole Duan, March 7, 2018.
• Ideas on Fire Podcast, “Imagine Otherwise: On Resisting Imperial Visuality,” Interview with Dr. Cathy Hannabach, October, 5, 2016.
• Studio Museum Magazine, “Office Hours: Interview with Curator Thomas J. Lax,” July 6, 2010.

Selected Awards, Fellowships, and Grants

UIC Award for Creative Activity (ACA) Program (2024, $25,000, PI)

UIC Scholar of the Year Award – Rising Scholar in Humanities, Arts, Design, and Architecture Division (2022-2023)

UIC Provost COVID-19 Relief Program Grant (2023-2024; award amount: $15,000, PI)

National Endowment for the Humanities Dialogues on the Experiences of War Grant (2022, $100,000, Shared-PI)

UIC Award for Creative Activity (ACA) Program (2022, $25,000, PI)

UIC Silver Circle Award for Teaching Excellence (2021-2022)

UIC Humanities Innovation Grant, Institute for the Humanities (2021, $10,000, Shared-PI)

UIC Teaching Recognition Program Award (2020-2021)

Mellon Humanities Without Walls Seed Grant on “Reciprocity & Redistribution” (2021, $5,000, Shared-PI)

Surveillance Studies Network Best Book Prize for Insurgent Aesthetics (2020)

New York University, Asian/Pacific/American (A/P/A) Institute, Visiting Scholar (2019-2020)

UIC LAS Dean's Award for Faculty Research in the Humanities (2017-2018, award amount: $2,000)

Mellon Art History Publishing Initiative Grant, Duke University Press, (2016, $8,000 for first book costs)

UIC Great Cities Institute (GCI) Faculty Scholarship (2015-2016)

UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy (IRRPP) Faculty Fellowship (2015-2016)

University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship (2012-2013)

Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD) in Liberal Arts Colleges Dissertation Fellowship (2011-2012)

NYU College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award (2010)

Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Anita Affeldt Graduate Student Award (2009)

Stanford University Tom Ford Fellowship in Philanthropy (2005-2006)

Stanford University Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in the Humanities (2005)

GWS Courses Taught

GWS 101: Gender in Everyday Life

GWS 204: Gender & Popular Culture

GWS 345: Queer Theory

GWS 390: Feminism and Social Change

GWS 407: Advanced Seminar in Queer and Trans Studies

GWS 455: Feminism & Justice: Abolition & Decolonization

GWS 494: Prisons, Policing, & American Warfare

GWS 494: Climate Feminisms & Radical Worldmaking

GWS 501: Feminist/Queer/Trans Theory

GWS 502: Feminist/Queer/Trans Knowledge Production (Methods)

GWS 594: Feminism, Abolition, & War

PhD, American Studies, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University
MA, American Studies, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University
BA, with honors and distinction, Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University