Swapna Kona Nayudu

Swapna Kona Nayudu

Member of the Advisory Council
Nayudu

Swapna Kona Nayudu’s work is most centrally focused on the relationship between war and politics. To that end, her research interests are in Critical International Relations, International History, the Cold War in the Third World, UN Peacekeeping and Security Studies. Swapna also works on Indian political thought as a specific field of intellectual history. Her first monograph, under review at press, is an international history of Indian non-alignment.

Swapna’s work on the Cold War in India is on Indo-Soviet relations and has appeared in the edited volume, India and the Cold War and as a working paper for the Cold War International History Project; her paper on India’s diplomatic history has appeared in the journal Cold War History; her work on the multiple political traditions in early-twentieth century India led her to edit a special issue of the journal Global Intellectual History, for which she translated and explored in a paper the only book written in Hindustani by Nehru; a history of early Indian diplomacy and the establishment of the Indian Foreign Service appeared in the journal Diplomatica. Swapna has also written widely on India in the context of Asia-Africa relations, with pieces for Afro-Asia Visions, and forthcoming chapters in two edited volumes. Two current projects are on: first, a long essay on the 100 volumes of the Selected Works of Nehru, and second, an international history of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. Swapna conducts archival research with textual and oral histories in 14 languages.

Swapna Kona Nayudu took her PhD in War Studies from King’s College London, University of London. She is presently an Associate at the Harvard University Asia Center and an Associate at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute. She tweets @KonaNayudu.