Kavita Philip President's Excellence Chair in Network Cultures and as Professor of English with the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures. She is author of Civilizing Natures (Rutgers University Press), and co-editor of five volumes curating interdisciplinary work in radical history, political science, art, activism, gender, technology studies, and public policy.
Diverse articles and public writing engage with colonial history, postcolonial studies, histories of environment and technology, feminist activism, and science fiction studies. Forthcoming books include Studies in Unauthorized Reproduction: The Pirate Function and Decolonization (under contract, MIT Press).
Kavita Philip has a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell, an M.A. in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from Cornell, an M.S. in Physics from the University of Iowa, and a B.Sc. in Physics (with Chemistry and Mathematics minors) from Stella Maris College (University of Madras, India).
Kavita Philip has been a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (History of Planning project), Convener of the “Urban Ecologies” Residential Research Group at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender, Senior Fellow, in “Industrial Environments” at Rutgers University Center for Historical Analysis, and an NEH Summer Seminar participant at Columbia University, in “Human Rights and Relativism.”
She won the E. Roe Stamps Excellence-in-Teaching Award at Georgia Tech, and has received numerous grants for innovations at the intersections of teaching and research. She founded the Science, Technology and Race (STAR-Pedagogy) project, in collaboration with Nahum Chandler and the Consortium for Black Studies. Her curriculum design has created courses cross-listed across Arts, Anthropology, History, International Studies, Informatics, Public Health, and Women's Studies. She has served on graduate committees in History, Informatics, Studio Arts, English, Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Political Science, and Media Studies.
She served as Director of the Critical Theory Institute (CTI, 2008 – 2011), and as Program Faculty in Arts, Computation, Engineering (ACE, 2004-2009).