Nivetha Karthikeyan

Nivetha Karthikeyan's picture
PhD Student
Email: 
niv.karthikeyan@yale.edu
Research Areas: 
critical data studies, critical disability and chronic illness studies, women-of-color feminism, crip-of-color theory

Niv is a third year graduate student in the History of Science and Medicine program and the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration certificate program. She is preoccupied with questions of data, pain, and medical violence. Her research is guided by how pain, particularly of women of color in the US, gets recognized (or not) and treated (or not) - by medical professionals and historians alike.

Niv is currently learning how to be a care-full teacher, and is experimenting with what radical access can look like in the space of the college classroom. It is giving her a lot of joy.

Niv earned a B.S. in Computer Science and History from Caltech in 2020. Her undergraduate thesis traced changing and increasingly racialized categories of “technical skill” in twentieth century US immigration law, and included both Mexican braceros and South Asian tech workers as historical actors. Prior to arriving at Yale, Niv worked in immigrants’ rights at the ACLU and in community memory-work at the South Asian American Digital Archive. Her work as an academic remains rooted in her commitments to community.