Northwestern University professor Dilip Gaonkar directs the Center for Global Culture and Communication and the Center for Transcultural Studies, an independent scholarly research network concerned with global issues. Gaonkar’s Academy project charts the trajectory of anti-democratic thought, disguised as crowd theory, within the Western tradition. It also explores the extent to which non-Western intellectuals, including nationalist and postcolonial intellectuals in the global South, have been drawn to this long-held suspicion directed at the demos as crowd.