Professor Swarna Rajagopalan trained as a political scientist. She works as an independent scholar, consultant and writer and peace and gender equality are common concerns across her work.
Professor Rajagopalan’s research interests relate to security, politics and gender. She writes regularly for both academic projects and general publications. She has taught politics and international relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State University and Yale University. She has also taught at Sophia College, Mumbai and more recently, at the National Management School’s India campus for Broward University.
She founded and runs The Prajnya Trust. Her work at Prajnya combines research and public education with training, advocacy, network and capacity-building.
Professor Rajagopalan’s consultancy work has included academic projects, from conceptualising and organising academic conferences to hosting and co-directing a summer study abroad programme for Michigan State in Chennai for two years. She has been part of a recently completed British Academy-funded project on domestic violence help-seeking in three Indian states. She led a regional project relating the rise of extremism to gender-based violence.
She is a founding member of the Women’s Regional Network, a network of women peace activists from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka.
In 2023, Professor Rajagopalan became Chair of the International Political Science Association’s Research Committee on Women and Politics in the Global South.
Professor Rajagopalan’s website is at https://www.swarnar.com.
Global Politics in the 21st Century (An Introduction)
Indian Foreign Policy
South Asian Politics and International Relations
