Rajeshwari Deshpande is Professor of Politics at the Savitribai Phule Pune University. She was the ICCR visiting professor (Rajiv Gandhi chair in Contemporary Indian Studies) at the University of Technology, Sydney in 2014 and UKIERI visiting fellow at King’s India Institute, London in 2012. Her research interests are in areas such as intellectual traditions of Maharashtra, comparative state politics, politics of the urban poor, urban caste-class realities, women’s politics and politics and policies related to social welfare. At present, Rajeshwari is the Lead researcher in India for a European Commission sponsored international research project ‘Cultural Heritage and Identities of Europe’s Future (CHIEF-2018-2021 http://chiefproject.eu/ ) in which a consortium of eight European Universities along with Savitribai Phule Pune University from India are partners. She is also working on a research project that examines the linkages between welfare and vote in Indian elections and is the series editor for the Sage series on ‘State Politics in India’ that reviews contemporary state politics in India in the form of monographs on major states. She has recently published an intellectual biography of a late colonial Gandhian intellectual from Maharashtra- Acharya Javdekar in Marathi and has edited, in 2015, ‘Politics of Welfare: Comparisons Across Indian States’ (with Louise Tillin and K. K. Kailash, Oxford University Press). She has also published more than thirty research papers and book chapters in English as well as in Marathi during the past ten years and has successfully guided seven PhD candidates. She regularly contributes to the OP-ED pages of English and Marathi newspapers like the Indian Express, Times of India, the Hindu and Loksatta. Rajeshwari has been a member of the Lokniti network of Indian political scientists that conducts the National Election Studies in India and has worked on the nature of women’s vote in Indian elections using the NES data. She is a member of the editorial management team of the Lokniti/Sage journal ‘Studies in Indian Politics’ where she also coordinates a discussion forum on ‘Teaching and Learning Political Science in India.’