Dr. Kohli received his PhD at Tufts University and taught at Tufts, Middlebury College, and the University of Vermont before joining DePaul in 2003 as one of the first two faculty hired in the African and Black Diaspora Studies Program. Under his leadership, the Program gained Department status in 2017. Kohli was selected as DePaul Presidential Fellow for the 2022-23 academic year. In 2021, he was a part of the team that secured a two-million-dollar Mellon grant for the creation of the Social Transformation Research Collaborative (STRC).
Kohli’s most recent book publication is as editor of A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson (University of Michigan Press), which was a nominee for the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPYY). His publications include scholarly essays on Black literature and culture published in the journals Callaloo, MELUS, African Identities, and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Kohli is also an editor of the book Uprooting Urban America: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Race, Class, and Gentrification (Peter Lang).
Kohli’s dynamic and expansive scholarship has also appeared in a number of edited collections, including Jazz and American Culture (Cambridge University Press), Spatial Futures: Difference and the Post-Anthopocene (Palgrave MacMillan), The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (Cambridge University Press), Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the “Howl" Generation (Bloomsbury), The Black Imagination, Science Fiction, and the Speculative (Routledge) and Reconstructing the Beats (Palgrave MacMillan).
His research and teaching interests include literatures of the Black Diaspora, Black musical expression, the intersection between Black music and other areas of expression (language, literature, performance, visual art, politics). Classes he has taught at DePaul include: Black Music in American Culture; Harlem Renaissance and Négritude; Langston Hughes; Chicago's Black Cultural Renaissance; Jazz in the Diasporic Imagination; Global Black Music in Literature; African America: Ideas, Peoples, Cultures, Movements; Black Aesthetic Thought; Jazz and the Novel; Pan-Africanism; Race and Ethnicity in Literary Studies.