Kashish Bastola

Louisiana Capital Assistance Center | New Orleans, Louisiana

Kashish Bastola is a Nepali-American writer and historian, born in Birmingham, Alabama and raised in North Texas. Kashish is an archivist who is passionate about oral histories and works with the South Asian American Digital Archive, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and the Harvard University Archives. Kashish is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow at Harvard, studying geography and Asian American history in the American South. His research explores ethnic community formations as well as transnational urban and environmental histories. Kashish has written for TIME Magazine and High School SCOTUS on a range of constitutional issues as well.

Kashish has been serving indigent and working-class Americans through legal aid work since spending his senior year of high school working in a small North Texas criminal defense law office. In 2023, under the direction of historian and professor Walter Johnson, he worked at the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council where he served as a Tenant Advocate on eviction defense and fair housing cases. He supported litigation efforts in Centreville, Illinois (outside of East St. Louis) in pursuit of environmental justice for one of the poorest towns in America facing a public health crisis due to infrastructure failures. He also worked as a court-appointed mediator for landlord-tenant disputes in St. Louis County, Missouri. Additionally, Kashish works with the Harvard Immigrant Justice Lab where he conducts country condition and human rights research for active asylum cases represented by attorneys at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center.

This summer, with the support of Yale Law School’s Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellowship, Kashish is working with the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center in New Orleans, Louisiana where he will assist attorneys on various cases across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi to challenge death penalty sentences for clients charged with capital crimes. His work will support both litigation and mitigation efforts for LCAC. Kashish will also conduct research in the Mississippi Delta region in partnership with Southern Rural Development Center as a Shackouls College Mississippi Delta Scholar.

On campus, Kashish is the Community Organizing Chair of the Phillips Brooks House Association, a Radcliffe Institute Student Advisory Board Member and archives mentor for local public high schoolers, and has served on the Executive Board of Ghungroo, Harvard’s largest student-run production. He has worked as a public historian at the Harvard Forest, led the Asian American Association, and organized around affirmative action, ethnic studies, and first generation, low-income student issues. Kashish helps lead and teach Harvard CIVICS in Boston Public Schools and mentors low-income children in Cambridge for Harvard and Radcliffe Musical Outreach to Neighborhood Youth (PBHA HARMONY). Kashish is the recipient of the Class of 2026 Civic Engagement Award and proudly serves Eliot House as its Public Service Representative. On the weekends, Kashish can be found flipping burgers in the Eliot House Grille, giving his friends henna tattoos, or turkey-watching from the Barker Café.