Rahul Rao is a Reader in International Political Thought in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. Prior to this, he was Reader in Political Theory at SOAS University of London, where he taught from 2008–21, and Term Fellow in Politics at University College, University of Oxford. He read for a DPhil in International Relations at Balliol College, University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and has a BA, LLB (Hons.) from the National Law School of India University. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective and used to blog at The Disorder of Things.

Rahul Rao has research interests in international relations, postcolonial and queer theory, and the politics of South Asia. Much of his work to date has explored the global politics of identity – gender, sexuality and, more recently, race and caste. He is the author of three books: Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010), Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020) – both published by Oxford University Press – and The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire (2025) published by Pluto Press. He is beginning to work on a project that explores the tensions between Marxist and post-Marxist approaches to the more-than-human turn in the humanities and social sciences and welcomes doctoral proposals in this area. His research has been supported by fellowships awarded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.