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 worked at SOAS University of London from 2008–23, where he was promoted to Professor shortly before leaving and where he remains a Professorial Research Associate. Between 2005–08, he was Term Fellow in Politics at University College, University of Oxford. Rahul 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, and grants provided by the British Institute in Eastern Africa and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Besides writing regularly for academic journals and collections, his work has appeared in The Caravan, Himal Southasian, Kafila, Mute, openDemocracy and on the Verso blog.