Community Studies Center

Sudarshan Kapur, Chair, Department of Peace Studies
BSc, International Relations and Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, UK
MA, Religion, Iliff School of Theology
PhD, Religion and Social Change, University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology.

Sudarshan Kapur began his career working as the Field Officer of the UK-based War on Want, Campaign Against World Poverty, subsequent to which he directed Friends Rural Center, an anti-poverty project of the Religious Society of Friends—Quakers—in India. The years he spent with the poor are foundational to his teaching and scholarship. He has taught extensively at the Iliff School of Theology, the University of Denver and the University of Colorado at Boulder in the areas of religion and social change, peace and conflict studies, African American religion and history, and Gandhian Studies. In the early 1990s, Sudarshan Kapur helped to found the graduate Justice and Peace Program at the Iliff School of Theology. Before joining Naropa University in 2000, he directed the Denver-based Gandhi-Hamer-King Center for the Study of Religion and Democratic Renewal (now known as The Veterans of Hope Project). As part of his directorship of the project, he interviewed on tape several nonviolent activists and scholars from the Modern African American Freedom Movement and the contemporary Native American struggle. He is the producer of several educational videos. Sudarshan Kapur has published several essays and is the author of Raising Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi, named an outstanding book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. In 1993, he was nominated for the PEN Center USA West Literary Award in nonfiction.