Inaugural Lecture of the Chair of Social Anthropology, Professor Alpa Shah

Inaugural Lecture of the Chair of Social Anthropology and Fellow of All Souls College, Professor Alpa Shah

The title is to be announced.

Professor Alpa Shah is author of The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India (2024); Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas (2018); In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India (2010) and co-author of Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste and Class in 21st Century, India (2018). Her books have won the 2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize, the 2025 Times of India Author award and she has also been a twice-finalist (2019 and 2024) of the Orwell Political Writing Book Prize and winner of the 2022 ERC Public Engagement Prize. Her work has a broad reach across the social sciences and humanities and demonstrates the wider relevance of anthropological perspectives to contemporary global challenges. Professor Shah read for a BA Honours in Geography at the University of Cambridge and was trained as an anthropologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science from where she took up this Statutory Professorship in Social Anthropology in Oxford in 2024.