An Indian anthropologist and sociologist born in the United States. President and Rector of Central European University in Vienna. She leads a research group on soft authoritarianisms at the University of Bremen. A former Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, and Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva. A co-founder of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at CEU in Budapest.