Shourya Sen

I conduct research on comparative politics and political economy, studying how authoritarian regimes manage social change and build durable ties to their societies. My ongoing research seeks to understand the deep historical roots and mechanisms of change defining political and economic inequalities in authoritarian and hybrid regimes. My dissertation and book project offer a new vantage on violent rural revolutionary movements in the twentieth century by centering the impact that revolutionary mobilization had on skills and social networks as a critical microfoundation of subsequent transformations in politics, economics, and culture.

I am a scholar of Southeast Asia and the developing world more broadly, and have conducted fieldwork in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. In Laos and Thailand, this work is grounded in original surveys, genealogies, and oral histories collected through community-level partnerships, combining ethnographic fieldwork with econometric analysis. The resulting data advances knowledge of borderland communities about whom little is known in any academic field.

I have also written on colonialism in India and the history and political economy of education in Sub-Saharan Africa, extending my core agenda of studying social change and cooptation to diverse authoritarian contexts in the developing world.

My work has been recognized with the Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship, a university-wide award for exceptional students in their later years of study at Princeton. I am advised by Carles Boix, Leonard Wantchekon, Rory Truex, and Germán Gieczewski. I am on the 2026-2027 job market.