Professor Shirin Rai

Shirin M Rai FBA is Distinguished Research Professor of Politics and International Relations and a Fellow of the British Academy. She received her BA from the University of Delhi and MPhil/PhD from the University of Cambridge.

She is author of many peer reviewed articles in journals such as several books, including Depletion: the human cost of care (OUP, 2024), which received the BISA (British International Studies Association) 2025 Susan Strange Prize. She also received the International Studies Association Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section Eminent Scholar prize (2015) and BISA Distinguished Contribution Prize (2022). She is the Political Studies Association's Founding Fellow. 

Among her 16 edited books, she has also edited a volume on the writings of her father, Lajpat Rai, the Indian Debates on the International Left (2021). Other selected edited books include New Frontiers in Feminist Political Economy, 2014, (with Georgina Waylen), (Routledge IAFFE Advances in Feminist Economics), London: Routledge; Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives (eds. With Georgina Waylen), 2008, London, Palgrave Macmillan; National Machineries for the Advancement of Women: Mainstreaming Gender, Democratising the State? 2003, (ed. for the UN Division for the Advancement of Women) Manchester, Manchester University Press. She is currently writing a book Doing Politics Sideways (Routledge)

Shirin is an interdisciplinary scholar and has written extensively on issues of gender, governance and development and gender and political institutions. Her last research project was on the impact of COVID-19 on older people and their carers in Coventry and Leicester . 

Her current work has three strands:

• Feminist international political economy: see her work on depletion through social reproduction (2024) where she analyses the costs of doing social reproductive work, how this might be measured and transformed.
• Gender and political institutions: see Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament  (OUP, 2019)(with Carole Spary, OUP)
• Politics and performance: see the edited collections on performance and/or politics: OUP Handbook of Politics and Performance (2021), The Grammar of Politics and Performance (eds. with Janelle Reinelt, Routledge, 2015) and Democracy in Practice: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (ed. Palgrave, 2014) where she explores how performance in and of institutional and informal politics are co-constitutive.