Sunil Khilnani is the Starr Foundation Professor and Director of South Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC. Khilnani was born in New Delhi and was awarded his PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge. Before joining the Johns Hopkins faculty, he was Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College at the University of London and was a visiting Professor of Politics at Seikei University in Tokyo. Khilnani has been elected a fellow of Christ’s College at University of Cambridge and has held fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. His research centers on the history of political intellectuals and the development of democracy outside the West. He is a leading expert on Indian and its society and politics, as well as their historical roots. Professor Khilnani has worked on a biography of former Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru while at the Wissenschaftskolleg, and on a history of democracy in India. His publications include Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (Yale University Press, 1993; German translation, 1995), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (with Sudipta Kaviraj: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and The Idea of India (3rd Edition, Penguin Books, 2001), which was translated into Hindi, French, and Arabic. He serves as a member of the editorial board of The Political Quarterly and is a member of the Scientific Council of the Institute for Advanced Study in Nantes. He is a recipient of the 2005 Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award by the Indian government.

At the Academy, Khilnani will explore the paradoxical nature of India’s achievements as seen from the perspective of India's political and socio-economic history. How and why did one of the most elaborately colonized parts of the world manage to give vigorous life to democratic government, and how could democracy emerge in a social order designed to resist the value of equality – and in one of the poorest regions of the world? Even if India poses puzzles within the frame of its own history, Khilnani will prove that Indian democracy also provokes questions about the global possibilities and diffusion of democracy.