PUBLIC HEALTH • SOCIAL WELFARE • HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
NATIONALISM • ETHNIC POLITICS •
• INDIA •
Prerna Singh is Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies, with appointments in the School of Public Health and the Department of Sociology at Brown University.
She has published numerous award-winning books and articles on human development, public health, ethnicity and nationalism. Her first book, How Solidarity Works for Welfare was awarded best book prizes from both the American Political Science and the American Sociological Associations.
Singh has been awarded fellowships by the Rockefeller foundation, the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew Carnegie foundation, the American Academy of Berlin, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and the American Institute of Indian Studies.
She has shared her research with scholarly, policy and popular audiences in over a hundred lectures, including keynote addresses, delivered across twenty different countries.
Singh has served on the academic advisory board of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the steering committee of the Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown, is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and co-convenes the Brown-Harvard-MIT Joint Seminar in South Asian Politics. She also serves on the editorial board of Cambridge University Press’s Studies in Comparative Politics and Elements in the Politics of Development series and was previously on the editorial board of the journal, Studies in Comparative International Development. From 2021-23, Singh serves as President of the Comparative Politics section of the American Political Science Association.
She is presently working on a book entitled 'Moral Vaccination: How Ideas and Institutions Controlled Contagion in China and India'. The book draws on a comparative historical analysis of subnational (cities, provinces) and national units of China and India to develop a novel 'moral' theory of popular compliance with public health interventions, specifically vaccination,.
In addition, she is working on a range of collaborative projects around the themes of nationalism, on the one hand, and development, welfare and well-being, specially public health, on the other. This includes co-authoring a book ‘National Solidarities and Strong States: When and Why Ethnic Diversity is not a Curse for Development and Democracy’ with Matthias vom Hau for Cambridge University Press’s Elements in the Politics of Development series.
Singh has contributed popular writing to the LA Times, the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, the Hindu, the Times of India and the Seminar among other outlets.
She has studied at Princeton, Cambridge and Delhi Universities. Prior to joining Brown, she was on the faculty of the Department of Government at Harvard University.
Contact
The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Brown University
111 Thayer Street
Providence, RI 02912
E-mail: prerna_singh@brown.edu