Professor Nitasha Kaul receives prestigious British Academy award for international and interdisciplinary research

Kaul, a Professor of Politics, International Relations and Critical Interdisciplinary Studies, is one of the nine national awardees recognised for her work on Kerala, a state on India's tropical Malabar Coast.

Thanks to the award, Professor Kaul will continue her work on Democracy, Ideology, and Political Dynamics in Kerala over the next 12 months, along with her overseas collaborator Dr Nisar Kannangara from the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bengaluru, India.

Professor Kaul said of the importance of the award: “The British Academy has been superb in making vital interdisciplinary international collaborations like ours happen. The award nurtures our pioneering work on Kerala, a socio-politically unique Indian state that does well in development indexes, has effectively implemented decentralisation policies, and yet also offers paradoxical outcomes in the electoral political and ideological realm."

Professor Kaul and Dr Kannangara have collaborated before in their work on Kerala and their research on The Persistence of Political Power: A Communist ‘Party Village’ in Kerala and the Paradox of Egalitarian Hierarchies, was published in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society in 2021.

Funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Knowledge Frontier awards build on and extend existing international and interdisciplinary research collaborations between UK-based SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy) researchers and their colleagues overseas.

Learn more about the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster.