Mahmood Mamdani is a prominent Ugandan academic and political commentator, born in Mumbai in 1946 and raised in Kampala. He currently serves as the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, and previously directed the Makerere Institute of Social Research from 2010 to 2022, specializing in African politics, colonialism, and post-colonialism. His early life included a 1963 Kennedy Airlift scholarship to the US, where he earned degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, Tufts, and Harvard (PhD in 1974). Notably, he participated in the 1965 civil rights march in Montgomery, Alabama, where he was jailed, and he was later expelled from Uganda by dictator Idi Amin in 1972. He is married to filmmaker Mira Nair and is the father of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.