Assistant Professor Dr. Shikhar Goel

Shikhar Goel is an anthropologist of law, media, and technology with a focus on contemporary South Asia. In October 2026, he joined the Department of Anthropology at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, as an Assistant Professor (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter). 

He defended his PhD with Distinction in 2026 in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University (NYU). His doctoral thesis, entitled Technical Mutations in the Kaghazi Raj (Paper State): Law in Digital India, draws on more than two years of intensive multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at law enforcement institutions, including police stations in semi-urban, Hindi-speaking districts of North India, state forensic science laboratories, trial courts adjudicating terror cases, and the Registry of the Supreme Court of India. Across these sites, it maps processes of realignment, bargaining, improvisation, and renegotiation unfolding as the Indian state incorporates digital tools into the quotidian, paper-saturated processes of crime investigation, documentation, and adjudication across cases ranging from petty cyber fraud to anti-state terror conspiracies. It asks how changes in the means of information production reshape the internal functioning of penal-state institutions. He is currently developing the dissertation into a book.