Kalyan Nadiminti works on twentieth and twenty-first century multi-ethnic and global Anglophone literatures, with a particular focus on Asian American, transnational Muslim, and African diasporic literatures. He is currently at work on a scholarly monograph, Difficult Work: Race, Transnationalism, and Labor in Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, which brings together multi-ethnic and transnational writers to examine the relationship of the minoritized subject to the American ideal of white-collar work. From Jhumpa Lahiri to Mohsin Hamid to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, "Difficult Work" reads raced, gendered, and migrant subjects that query the ideology of American professionalism by mixing anti-work and anti-imperial feeling.

Kalyan's second project, Provincializing 9/11: Terror, Geopolitics, and Contemporary Literature, contends that multi-ethnic and global South writers construct literary genealogies of terror to interrogate the mythic status of 9/11 as a foundational event in global histories of terrorism. At the invitation of the POLIS Project, he presented a portion of the work at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he was also in conversation with former Guantánamo detainee and author Mohamedou Ould Slahi and his editor Larry Siems. 

Kalyan's work is forthcoming or has been published in journals such as NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Journal of Asian American Studies, Textual Practice, South Asia Review, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He has taught courses on race, ethnicity, and literature at Haverford's History department, Penn's English department, the Asian American Studies Program, and Michigan State University.