Mridu Rai
Mridu Rai is an Indian historian who serves as a professor at Presidency University, Kolkata. Rai is the author of the prizewinning book Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir (2004). Education
Mridu Rai graduated with an honours in history from the University of Delhi in 1986. She completed her master's degree, with a major in medieval Indian history, from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 1988. She finished her M.Phil. in 1991, with medieval Indian history as her major. She completed her M.Phil. in modern South Asian history at Columbia University in 1994. Then she completed her PhD in modern South Asian history from the same university in 2000. Her Ph.D. dissertation was called: 'The Question of Religion in Kashmir: Sovereignty, Legitimacy and Rights, 1846–1947'. The dissertation analysed the mixture of religion and politics in Kashmir and examined the Hindu state in princely Jammu and Kashmir. Career
In 1997–1998, Rai taught as a visiting lecturer at Tufts University. In 1999, she taught as an adjunct instructor at Columbia University. Between 1999 and 2007, she served as assistant professor first at Bowdoin College and later at Yale University. From 2007 to 2010, she served as an associate professor at Yale University. In 2010–2011, Rai was a research fellow at the Davis Centre for Historical Studies at Princeton University. From 2011 to 2014, she taught at Trinity College, Dublin, where she was a member of the Department of History. Since 2014, she is serving as a professor at Presidency University, Kolkata. She has held senior research fellowships at Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center, Yale University (2007–2010) and the American Institute of Indian Studies (2007–2008). She was an Honorary Fellow of Netaji Institute for Asian Studies in Kolkata from 2017 to 2018. She also held the Whitney Griswold Fellowship at Yale University. Rai has also obtained the Morse Fellowship at Yale University (2004–2005), the Freeman Foundation Fellowship for Faculty Research at Bowdoin College (2000) and the University Traveling Fellowship in Columbia University (1994–1995). In 2016, Rai also was on a Cambridge-Hamied Visiting Lecturership at the Centre of South Asian Studies in the University of Cambridge. Rai teaches all aspects of Indian history., including imperial and colonial history. She also supervises master's degree dissertations. She is currently working on a history of Kashmir and on the geography of justice pertaining to caste violence in North India. 