Alpa Shah is the Statutory Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford, with a Fellowship at All Souls College. Her research and writings span many themes including revolutionary insurgency, state and citizenship; terrorism, democracy and human rights; global capitalism, inequality and poverty; agrarian change, precarious labour migration and informal economies of care; indigenous politics, conservation and environmental justice; race, caste, class and gender relations. Much of Alpa’s writings are based on the experience of deep immersive field research among the forest dwelling indigenous people of eastern India – Adivasis. She has also conducted research in Nepal and among Dalits, stigmatised as Untouchable people.

Alpa’s latest book, The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India is a finalist for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, on the 2024 longlist for the Moore Human Rights Prize, and on the Financial Times ‘What to Read in 2024’ list. It has garnered widespread acclaim in The Times, Guardian, The Financial Times, New Statesman, Telegraph and Nature, amongst others.

Her last book, Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas, won many accolades including being a finalist for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the New India Foundation Book Prize, longlisted for the 2019 Tata Live Literary Non-fiction Award, selected as a 2018 Book of the Year for the New Statesman, History Workshop, Scroll India, a Hindu Year in Review Book, and a Hong Kong Free Press Best Human Rights Book. In 2020, Nightmarch won the Association of Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize in Critical Anthropology.

Alpa has also co-authored Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India, a 2018 Book of the Year for the Hindu, which draws on a major research programme she led on inequality and poverty that explodes the myth of trickle-down economics. It shows how and why tribal and untouchable communities – Adivasis and Dalits – who make up one in twenty-five people in the world, remain at the bottom of social and economic hierarchies despite the country’s economic growth. Behind the Indian Boom is a visual exhibition based on this research. 

Alpa’s first book In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India was based on two and a half years of living with indigenous people in the undulating forests of the state of Jharkhand, India. 

Alpa has edited seven volumes on issues ranging from affirmative action, agrarian change, revolution in India and Nepal, emancipatory politics, economic growth in India, and Adivasi and Dalit political pathways. As a scholar, Alpa has published widely not only in the top journals of anthropology but also in those of geography, sociology and development studies. See publications for a full list. Over the years, Alpa’s theoretical contributions to anthropology have sought to marry culturalist approaches with a wider political economy lens, shedding light on the processes of social transformation that both unite and differentiate communities.

Alpa’s research has been generously funded by major research grants from the EU European Research Council, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. She serves on, or served on, the editorial boards of several prominent journals in Anthropology including American Ethnologist, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, Focaal and Dialectical Anthropology, and on journals in South Asia Studies and Development Studies. At LSE, Alpa has a long-term involvement in the establishment of the International Inequalities Institute, whose management committee she served on till 2023, and where she convened a research theme on Global Economies of Care. She was also on the advisory board of the LSE Gender Department. Alpa has served on the juries of several prizes including the BBC Ethnography Prize.

Alpa has been invited to speak all over the world about her research, from Dunedin to Princeton, and has delivered numerous distinguished lectures including the Malinowski Lecture, the Strathern Lecture and the Firth Lecture. Alpa is committed to public engagement and has reported and presented on the underbelly of India for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, including making a thirty-minute documentary on ‘India’s Red Belt’. She has also written for newspapers and magazines such as the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, the Times of India and Hindustan Times. In 2022, Alpa was winner of the 2022 ERC Public Engagement Prize.

Alpa was raised in Nairobi, read Geography at Cambridge and completed her PhD in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She taught anthropology for a decade at LSE, and for eight years at Goldsmiths, University of London. Oxford University appointed Alpa as the Professor of Social Anthropology with a Fellowship at All Souls College in 2024 and she became the eighth person to hold the post, the first woman and the first person of the global majority.

Alpa lives in Oxford and is represented by David Godwin of David Godwin Associates.