Professor

Ph.D. University of Chicago

M.Phil. University of Oxford  (Rhodes Scholar)
 
Ananya Vajpeyi is a scholar and writer, working at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is completing a book about the modern life of Sanskrit for W.W. Norton. An anthology of her essays about cities is forthcoming from Women Unlimited in 2025. She has long-term research and writing projects on the life and ideas of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), as well as the "Shudra" as a social category.

She is currently a Research Consultant with the Nilgiri Archeological Project at the University of Ghent, and a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University, where she teaches a Foundation Course on Great Books. She writes widely for newspapers and magazines in India and internationally, on arts, culture, politics and ideas.  

PUBLISHED BOOKS

Prolegomena to the Study of People and Places in Violent India, with a preface by Pratap Bhanu Mehta (WISCOMP: Perspectives #26, 2007).

Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, Harvard University Press (2012). Winner of the 41st Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Award (2011-12); the Tata First Book Prize -- Non-Fiction (2013); the Crossword Award -- Non-Fiction (2013).

Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent. Ramin Jahanbegloo and Ananya Vajpeyi, Ed. Oxford University Press (2018).

Minorities and Populism: Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe. Volker Kaul and Ananya Vajpeyi, Ed. Springer NL (2020).

Editor of AROOP: Journal of the Raza Foundation, Vol. 4: "Failure" (2020) and Vol. 5: "Future" (2024). 

FELLOWSHIPS

She has been a Visiting Fellow (2019-20) and a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow (2017-18) at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge; a Global Ethics Fellow with the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs, New York (2014-2017); a Kluge Fellow at the John W. Kluge Centre, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (2013-14); a Senior Fellow with the American Institute of Indian Studies, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (2012); and an IDRC Visiting Fellow at CSDS (2011-12). She has collaborated regularly since 2011 with RESET: Dialogue of Civilizations, based in Rome and Milan, Italy.

Email: vajpeyi(at)csds.in