Prerna Singh is Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown University with appointments in the Department of  Behavioral and Social Sciences at the School of Public Health , the Department of Sociology and the Center for Contemporary South Asia. Singh’s research focuses on human development and social welfare, particularly, public health; on nationalism and ethnic politics, and the relationship between the two. Her work combines multiple methods including comparative historical, statistical, survey and experimental analyses. Her book, How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India (Cambridge University Press 2016), was awarded both the American Political Science Association’s  Woodrow Wilson prize for the best book published in politics and international relations, as well as the American Sociological Association’s Barrington Moore prize for the best book published in comparative historical sociology. 

Singh is a recipient of the so-called ’brainy award’ from the Andrew Carnegie foundation, the Berlin prize from the American Academy of Berlin, the Stanley and Priscilla Kochanek prize from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter honorific fellowship from Princeton University, as well as fellowships from the SSRC, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and the Center for Advanced Study for India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania.  Singh has delivered over a hundred invited talks in scholarly, policy and popular venues across the US, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, India, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, India, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Singh is working on a book - Embedded Interventions: Ideas, Institutions and the Control of Contagion in China and India , which analyzes the control of infectious diseases via the uptake of vaccines in China and India through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Biography current as of February 10, 2020