Nishant Upadhyay is a Shuimu Postdoctoral Fellow at the Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing. His research examines political theology, sovereignty, political personhood, and the relationship between religion and politics across South Asia and the wider Global South. His work brings political theory, religious studies, intellectual history, and international relations into conversation to examine how religious and mythic vocabularies shape modern political authority. His recent research has examined the political reappropriation of bhakta and bhakti in contemporary India, Modi’s populist political persona and its relationship to foreign policy, and the masculine bodily symbolism of strongman politics. His article “The Epistemology and Ontology of a Bhakta: An Analysis of Pejorative and Secularised Meanings of Bhakta” appeared in Contemporary South Asia and “Broad Chest and Red Eyes: Idioms and Symbolics of Populism in Modi's Foreign Policy Discourse toward China” appeared in International Politics. His forthcoming chapter, “Strongman as a Great Man: Sacred Idiom in Modi’s Political Discourses for Legitimacy and Construction of a Strongman Self,” appears in Sacred Cultures in Global Politics (De Gruyter Brill, 2026). His broader work explores political theology, biopolitics, non-Western conceptions of sovereignty, and the political uses of religious traditions. He writes on X at @ReMarxed.
