Dr Kira Huju

I am a Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR). Between 2015 and 2021, I received my MPhil and DPhil in International Relations from DPIR, University of Oxford. My graduate studies and the doctoral dissertation received full funding from the Economic and Social Research Council UK and my alma mater, Balliol College.

I am currently working on a monograph entitled The Cosmopolitan Elite Revisited: Indian Diplomats and the Transnational Hierarchies of Belonging, which narrates the birth, everyday life, and fracturing of a Western-dominated international order from its margins. Through a critical sociological examination of the Indian Foreign Service, it revisits what it takes to belong among the “cosmopolitan elite” in international society and asks what the experience of historically marginalized actors inside the diplomatic club can tell us about the evident woes of international order today. Based on my doctoral dissertation, the book builds its arguments on the back of 85 candid and often intimate interviews with Indian diplomats, ministers, and academics, as well as on extensive archival research at Nehru Memorial Library and the National Archives of India.

As Departmental Lecturer, I serve as the Course Provider for the undergraduate PPE option The Politics of South Asia. I also work as thesis and general supervisor for seven graduate students at OSGA and DPIR. 

Before my lectureship, I was a tutor on the graduate course The International Relations of South Asia and on the undergraduate course Politics of the European Union, as well as a teaching assistant on the graduate course The European Union in Crisis. I co-edited the Special Theme Section of a 2017 issue of St Antony’s International Review, assisted Kalypso Nicolaïdis on her book Exodus, Reckoning, Sacrifice: Three Meanings of Brexit, and worked as Coordinator at the University of Oxford’s Brexit Office under Vice-Chancellor for Brexit Alastair Buchan. I have also been associated with the New Delhi office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in India and the Global Governance Unit at Wissenschaftliches Zentrum für Sozialforschung Berlin in Germany.