Ronak K Kapadia

Ronak K. Kapadia is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and curator whose research traces the entanglements of race, sexuality, war, aesthetics, and empire in the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century United States. He is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and affiliated faculty in Art History, Global Asian Studies, and Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. He holds a BA, with honors and distinction, in comparative ethnic studies from Stanford University and received an MA and PhD in American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University. Kapadia is the author of the award-winning Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press, 2019), a groundbreaking study of the radical experiments, freedom dreams, and queer world-making potential of contemporary art and aesthetics in the ongoing context of US war and empire in the Greater Middle East. He is also lead project director and co-curator of the 2023 Veteran Art Triennial and co-editor of Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire (Bridge Books, 2024).