Shalini Randeria

American-born Indian social anthropologist/sociologist Shalini Randeria has had a distinguished academic career at institutions of higher education across Europe. She was Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, where she was also Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy. She holds the Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen, where she leads a research group on “soft authoritarianism”.

She was educated at the Universities of Delhi, Heidelberg, and Oxford, where she belonged to the first cohort of women Rhodes Scholars. She received her Ph.D. and her Habilitation from the Free University of Berlin. She has held faculty positions at the Free University, Berlin; the University of Munich, and the University of Zurich, where she was Professor of Social Anthropology and Co-Director of the Gender Studies Competence Centre. She was Founding Chair of CEU’s Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology in Budapest.