Nitika is a lawyer and Ph.D. candidate in History, researching bail and criminal law in postcolonial India. She holds a B.A. in Humanities magna cum laude from Yale (2016), an LL.B. from the University of Delhi (2019), and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School (2023). Before the Ph.D., she litigated cases arising out of state violence in India. With civil liberties coalitions, she authored several fact-finding investigations into police atrocities. During a stint at a policy think tank, she worked across print and visual media on making queer rights primers accessible to multilingual audiences. She writes regularly on criminal justice issues for The Indian Express, The Caravan, Frontline and other news outlets. She also writes fiction and poetry. At Yale, she serves as a Graduate Affiliate for Silliman College and co-convened the Asia History Working Group last year.
She has experience writing and editing personal statements, application materials in the humanities and social sciences, legal memos, policy reports, academic papers, speeches, op-eds, fiction and poetry. She is excited about working with students at any stage of their writing process, from initial outlines to line edits, and loves brainstorming ways to communicate ideas to audiences outside one’s field or profession.