Shirin M. Rai is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies and the Director of Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (WICID) at the University of Warwick. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Shirin Rai is an interdisciplinary scholar and has written extensively on issues of gender, governance and development and politics and performance. In particular, she has been working on issues of gendered care and work and the costs of this carework, and on developing a framework of politics and performance across the social sciences/humanities boundaries. Her most recent books include Performing Representation, a commentary on women MPs in the Indian Parliament as well as co-edited the OUP Handbook of Politics and Performance. Her teaching and research build on this work at both theoretical and empirical levels. She is currently working on a book - Depletion: the human cost of care (OUP).