Pawan Dhingra wears many complimentary hats. He is an award-winning author, an associate provost and associate dean of the faculty at Amherst College, interim chief equity and inclusion officer, a former curator at the Smithsonian, and the former President of the Association for Asian American Studies. He has been department chair at two institutions. He is also the inaugural chair of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies Program at Amherst.

His byline includes The New York Times, Time Magazine, CNN, and many other venues. He and his work have been profiled on numerous media and public outlets, including the White House forum on AAPI heritage, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Colorlines, and elsewhere. He has written award-winning books; his most recent is the award-winning Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough (New York University Press), which The Wall Street Journal described as, “[A] fascinating look at a growing subculture,” and author Min Jin Lee described as a “fascinating exploration [that] gets to the root of education obsessions to expose our global anxieties, national biases, and parental hopes for our sons and daughters.”

Pawan co-curated the historic Smithsonian Institution’s Beyond Bollywood project. A frequent invited speaker, he has been profiled in the documentary, Spelling the Dream. He is honored to have been elected President of the Board of the South Asian American Digital Archive. He has been department chair and held tenured positions at Tufts University and Oberlin College. He is on Twitter @phdhingra1. Please use the contact page to be in touch.