Professor Nicolas Martin completed both his BA and PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His PhD, finalized in 2009, was based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Pakistan, focusing on the interplay of politics, patronage, and debt bondage. After completing his doctorate, he served as a teaching fellow at the LSE Anthropology Department until 2012. His extensive research during this period contributed to academic articles and a book discussing agrarian change, debt bondage, electoral politics, factionalism, violence, electoral fraud, and the relationship between Sufi Islam and landed power. In addition to authoring Politics, Landlords and Islam in Pakistan, published by Routledge in 2015, he also taught courses on economic anthropology, political and legal anthropology, ethnographic methods, and the interpretation of ethnographic texts.

In 2012, Professor Martin advanced to the role of Senior Research Fellow at the University College London Department of Anthropology. This transition followed the acquisition of research grants from the European Research Council (ERC) and Economic and Social Research (ESRC) by a team he was part of. These grants facilitated a study examining the growing connection between politics, crime, and business across South Asia. In 2013, his research journey led him to undertake fifteen months of fieldwork in an agrarian region of the Indian Punjab, further exploring the intersections of clientelistic politics, violence, and social inequality in rural Punjab.

In 2016, he joined the University of Zurich as Assistant Professor in the department of Indian studies. Two years later, he obtained a four-year SNSF grant for the project 'The Reproduction of Caste? Economic, political, and kinship strategies among Jats in Punjab' together with Dr. Clemence Jullien and further pursued in collaboration with Dr. Satendra Kumar. The project delves into questions about the continued influence of caste on social and political life and examines the impact of Dalit activism on existing power structures.  In addition to finalising a monograph on the topic of democracy and inequality in North India,  he is currently developing projects aiming to investigate migration processes from India to Europe and another to investigate channels for upward social mobility among Dalits in India.

At the University of Zurich, he has been teaching courses focusing on political, economic and social transformation in South Asia.  These include courses on democratic and electoral processes, the Indian economy and its institutions, kinship and gender, and on the transformation of caste and class. Since 2022, as an Associate Professor, Professor Martin is actively supervising PhDs on topics including electoral politics and welfare provision, debt and micro-credit, and social mobilization in South India.

Professor Martin’s research examines two interrelated themes: the socio-political dimensions of modernisation and state formation, and the role of democratic institutions and electoral politics in advancing social equity. The first theme investigates how processes of modernisation and state-building have shaped religion, caste, and class structures, with a primary focus on India and Pakistan. This includes an analysis of economic transformation and an inquiry into why caste and religion continue to play such a central role in regional politics.  The second theme focuses on democratic institutions and electoral politics, particularly their effectiveness in realising constitutional ideals of equality. This work critically assesses whether and how electoral competition and governance structures have contributed to reducing entrenched disparities or, conversely, reinforced existing hierarchies. Looking ahead, Professor Martin’s research will expand to examine pathways of upward social mobility in South Asia, with particular attention to how international migration reshapes power dynamics within India’s diasporic communities. This future work will explore the extent to which transnational mobility disrupts or reproduces existing structures of privilege and marginalisation.