Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. She is a scholar and writer, working at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is the author of the award-winning book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Harvard, 2012).
Dr. Vajpeyi was educated at the Jawaharlal Nehru University - New Delhi, the University of Oxford, where she read as a Rhodes Scholar (India and Exeter College), and the University of Chicago, where she earned a PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations. She has been a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in Washington DC (2013-14), a Global Ethics Fellow with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, NY (2014-17) and more recently a Charles Wallace Trust Fellow as well as a Visiting Fellow at CRASSH, University of Cambridge (2017-18; 2019-20).
She is currently working on a political biography of Sanskrit for W.W. Norton, as well as her long-term project, an intellectual life of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956). She writes regularly about politics, arts and ideas for newspapers and magazines in India and abroad. She has published in Foreign Affairs, New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, World Policy Journal, New Statesman, The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Calcutta Telegraph, and numerous other venues.
More details at: https://www.csds.in/ananya_vajpeyi
Ananya was also involved as a speaker and participant with EPIIC and IGL from 2008-10, when she taught South Asian and World History at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. She also taught as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in South Asian Studies at SIPA, Columbia University in 2006-07, and before that was a Visiting Fellow in South Asian Studies at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC in 2004. In April 2013 she delivered the First Jalal Alamgir Memorial Lecture at Tufts University.