Prof. Srirupa Roy

Srirupa Roy is professor of political science and modern Indian studies at the University of Göttingen, where she chairs the “state and democracy” research group. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and was an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst before moving to Germany in 2011. She has been a fellow of the Social Science Research Council (MacArthur Program on International Peace and Security; Middle East North Africa Program), the American Institute of Indian Studies, the International Centre of Advanced Study at New York University, and visiting faculty at Yale University. She serves on the steering committee and fellowship selection committee of the Social Science Research Council’s InterAsia Program, and is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and an editorial board member of Critical Asian Studies and Contemporary South Asia.

She is interested in comparative and transregional studies of nationalism, decolonization, and state formation; media and cultural politics; and the relationship between economic and democratic change in InterAsian contexts. Her current projects include a monograph on the rise of “political outsiders” and “counter-electoral forces” in electoral democracies, and an SSRC supported collaborative research project with Professor Paula Chakravartty of New York University on “media and the new political” with a specific focus on the transregional politics of “mediatized populism”.

Roy’s books include Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Duke University Press, 2007), Violence and Democracy in India (co-authored with Amrita Basu, Seagull/Berghahn 2006), and Visualizing Secularism and Religion (co-authored with Alev Cinar and Maha Yahya, University of Michigan Press, 2012). She has published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Media, Culture, and Society, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Identities, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Interventions, South Asia, Theory & Event, and several edited volumes.