BIOGRAPHY
Shalini Randeria was elected as president and rector of Central European University
in 2021. She is the first woman, and the first person from the Global South, to take
up this position since the founding of the university 30 years ago. Randeria has had a
distinguished academic career as a sociologist/social anthropologist at institutions of
higher education across Europe. She was rector of the Institute for Human Sciences,
Vienna, and a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development
Studies, Geneva, where she directed the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy.
Randeria holds the Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen, where she leads a
research group on “soft authoritarianisms.” She is deputy chair of the Class of Social
and Related Sciences, Academia Europaea and a distinguished fellow of the Munk
School, Toronto University. Randeria has published widely on the anthropology of
globalization, law, the state, and social movements with a regional focus on India.
Her influential podcast series, Democracy in Question, launched in 2021, is now in its
eighth season.