Prerna Singh is on sabbatical leave during the academic year 2024-2025.

Prerna Singh is Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown University. She holds appointments in the Department of Political Science and at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. She is also affiliated with the Department of Sociology and the Center for Contemporary South Asia. Singh is a fellow of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research (CIFAR) and co-convenor of the Brown-Harvard-MIT Joint Seminar in South Asian Politics. 

Singh completed her Ph.D. and masters in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, the tripos in Social and Political Studies from Cambridge University, UK, and a bachelors degree with honors in economics from St Stephen’s College at Delhi University. Before joining Brown, she was in the Department of Government at Harvard University. Singh is a recipient of the "brainy award" from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, the Berlin Prize from the American Academy of Berlin, the Stanley and Priscilla Kochanek Prize from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship from Princeton University, as well as fellowships from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and the Center for Advanced Study for India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania.  

Singh has delivered over a hundred talks on her research in a range of scholarly, policy and popular venues across the U.S., Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, India, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, India, Italy and the U.K. She has been invited to be the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Nordic Sociological Association, the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (ZIF), Germany; the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST); the World Bank’s Human Development Forum; and the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. Singh delivered the 2018 commencement address at the Lincoln School, an independent all-girls college-preparatory school in Providence, RI. 

Singh’s research focuses on the improvement of human well-being, particularly as it relates to the promotion of social welfare on the one hand and to the mitigation of ethnic conflict and competition on the other. Her work combines multiple methods, including comparative historical, ethnographic, statistical, survey, and experimental analyses. Singh’s research has won numerous prizes across the disciplines of political science and sociology. Her book, "How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India" (Cambridge University Press 2016), was awarded both the American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book published in politics and international relations, as well as the American Sociological Association’s Barrington Moore Prize for the best book published in comparative historical sociology. 

Singh has co-edited the "Handbook of Indian Politics" (Routledge 2013) and is the author of numerous chapters in edited volumes as well as several prize-winning journal articles, including in American Behavioral Scientist, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, World Development, World Politics and Studies in Comparative International Development. Singh is presently working on a number of different book projects. In her book manuscript, "Embedded Interventions: Ideas, Institutions and the Control of Contagion in China and India," Singh compares state-society relations in China and India through the lens of public health, focusing in particular on the control of infectious diseases via the uptake of technologies such as vaccines through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In "The Case for Nationalism," she proposes a two-dimensional understanding of nationalism towards showcasing the constructive potential of nationalism, especially as it can promote 'development as freedom' in the sense proposed by Amartya Sen, as the advancing of political, social and economic freedoms. In "Progress and the People: Nehru’s India and Mao’s China," Singh analyzes how differences in the place of the "people" in the visions of development articulated influenced the distinct trajectories of "progress" pursued by the newly sovereign states of India and China under Nehru and Mao respectively in the 1950s and 1960s.