Malvika Maheshwari is associate professor of political science at Ashoka University. She holds degrees in the discipline from Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and completed her doctorate from Sciences Po, Paris, in 2011. Prior to joining Ashoka, she taught South Asian politics at Sciences Po (Paris & Le Havre), and was research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Her research lies at the intersection of political thought and art practice, especially as it relates to phenomena like violence, power, democracy and state capacity. Her articles have been published in journals Raisons Politiques, Studies in Indian Politics, Economic and Political Weekly, The Arts Politic among others. Malvika’s first book, Art Attacks: Violence and Offence-taking India was published in 2019 (Oxford University Press). As a Charles Wallace India Trust fellow, she will be in Cambridge University later this year (2022), working on her second book project on the National Akademies of Art and the Making of India’s Democracy: The Politics of Administering Aesthetics in Postcolonial India, partially funded by the Global Humanities Initiative travel grant.