About Khyati

Khyati Y. Joshi is a public intellectual whose social science research and community connections inform educators, thought leaders, and everyday people about race, religion, and immigration in 21st century America. She has lectured around the world and published ground-breaking scholarly and popular work, while also serving as an advisor to policy-makers and a leader in the South Asian American community. Her most recent book, White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America (NYU Press, 2020), examines the intersections of race and religion in U.S. history and contemporary social culture. She was also author and co-editor of Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice 3rd edition (Routledge, 2015), one of the most widely-used books by diversity practitioners and social justice scholars alike.

Dr. Joshi is a Professor of Education at Fairleigh Dickinson University where she was recognized with the FDU Distinguished Faculty Award for Research and Scholarship in 2014. She is member and past Co-Chair (2008-2011) of the managing board for the Asian Pacific American Religion Research Initiative (APARRI), and serves as co-Principal Investigator on APARRI’s project to support emerging scholars and promote greater public engagement on the religious realities of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, supported by a $1 million grant from the Luce Foundation.

She frequently consults with school districts, independent schools, the judiciary, non-profit organizations, faith communities, policy-makers, and the business community on fostering equity and inclusion. She is well-known for creating the Institute for Teaching Diversity and Social Justice, which offers multi-day professional development programs for educators since 2007. She has presented her research to scholars around the world, and inspired popular audiences in the United States and abroad. She has delivered lectures and workshops, including before audiences at the Yale Divinity School, Fuller Theological Seminary, Penn State, the University of Connecticut, Duke University, the Medical University of South Carolina, the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine; the University of Mumbai and North Gujarat University in India; the University of Balamand, Lebanon; and Aarhus University, Denmark. She has addressed audiences at Fortune 500 companies, and delivered continuing education and other programs before members of the New Jersey State Bar Association, the New Jersey Education Association, the National Association of Independent Schools’ (NAIS) People Of Color Conference, the New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS), the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities, the federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C., the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, the North American Hindu Chaplain Association, the National Council for Social Studies, The Privilege Institute’s White Privilege Conference, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty; and many more.

Dr. Joshi has advised federal, state, and local officials on issues affecting Indian Americans in New Jersey and beyond. She delivered her research on Hindu American Communities at the White House in 2010, and co-authored Jersey Promise’s groundbreaking 2019 Report On The State Of Asian Americans in New Jersey. Prof. Joshi was invited to address the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna, Austria, on the racialization of religion, particularly Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam, as it relates to the development of policies to prevent and combat hate crimes in the 56 countries in the OSCE region. She was an invited panelist for Preparing for 2050: The changing face of Race in America at Yale’s Arts and Ideas Festival, which was broadcast on C-Span. She serves on The Drumthwacket Foundation’s Board of Trustees, where she has developed curricula and teaching resources on Asian Pacific Americans, and as a member of the New Jersey Amistad Commission. As a member of the Center on American Women in Politics’ (CAWP) Bipartisan Coalition for Women’s Appointments, she has advocated increased representation of APA women in state government. In 2013, Dr. Joshi co-founded the South Asian American Caucus (SAAC), the first caucus of the New Jersey Democratic State Committee, and co-chaired the SAAC from 2013-2019. The religiously, generationally, and linguistically diverse Caucus raised the profile of South Asian American communities and assisted numerous first-time candidates from South Asian backgrounds win elected office. Dr. Joshi has also provided crisis consulting and training for government and elected officials.

Dr. Joshi’s first book, New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America (Rutgers University Press, 2006), earned the National Association for Multicultural Education’s 2007 Philip C. Chinn Book Award. In addition to the works mentioned above, she co-edited Envisioning Religion, Race, and Asian Americans (University of Hawaii Press, 2020), Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South (University of Illinois Press, 2013), and Investigating Religious Oppression and Christian Privilege (Sense Publishers, 2008). She co-authored chapters on religious oppression and immigration, racism and globalization for the second editions of both Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge, 2010) and Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge, 2007), and has contributed chapters to The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History (Oxford Univ. Press, 2018) and to the anthologies Intersections of Religion and Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Sustaining Faith Traditions (New York University Press, 2012). Dr. Joshi is the Religion, Schools And Society section editor for the Encyclopedia on Diversity in Education (Sage Publications), edited by James Banks.

Her recent academic presentations in the U.S. include invited papers at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS). Dr. Joshi has also presented papers at one or more annual conferences of the following scholarly organizations: American Studies Association (ASA), American Educational Research Association (AERA), National Association of Multicultural Educators (NAME), and APARRI.

Dr. Joshi writes an occasional column on “Living Religion” for Religion News Service, and was a 2020 Media Partnership Fellow at Sacred Writes. Often contacted by journalists, Professor Joshi has also appeared on MSNBC, CBS, BNC (the Black News Channel), C-Span, NDTV in India, CAN in Singapore, and other networks in the U.S. and abroad; been interviewed on PRI’s The World, WBAI Radio, the Voice of America, and other radio outlets; spoken as the featured guest on numerous podcasts; and been quoted in print in the New York Times, The Times of India, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Deseret News, the Boston Globe, the Houston Chronicle, India Abroad, the Saint Louis Dispatch, The Tennessean, and the Star Ledger and Daily Record of New Jersey, among others.

Khyati Y. Joshi earned her doctorate in Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She received a Masters in Theological Studies from Candler School of Theology at Emory University and a B.A. in Religion from Emory University. She also pursued post-graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and participated in the Summer Seminar for Educators at Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, in Israel. Prior to joining the faculty at Fairleigh Dickinson, Dr. Joshi was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, where for two years she taught Asian American Studies and Comparative Ethnic Studies. She also taught in the American Studies program at Princeton University. She lives in Wayne, New Jersey, with her husband and son.