Patrick French was appointed as the inaugural Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University in 2017. He holds an additional position as Professor for the Public Understanding of the Humanities, advocating for their importance in a well-rounded education. Professor French is an award-winning historian, biographer and political analyst, and has a PhD in South Asian Studies and an MA in English and American Literature, both from the University of Edinburgh. In 2016-18, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge University, and in 2018 he was the Derek Brewer Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He has held visiting positions at Ashoka University, the University of Warwick, University of the South Pacific, NYU Abu Dhabi and University of Pennsylvania.

His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages (see Publications) and have won awards including the Hawthornden Prize, the Royal Society of Literature WH Heinemann Prize, the US National Book Critics Circle Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He has been a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award and the BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize (now the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction). He is presently writing the authorised biography of the novelist Doris Lessing, following a competitive process of appointment. Much of his work has focussed on political and social analysis of India in the decades directly before and after independence in 1947, and the period following economic ‘liberalisation’ in the 1990s.

At the School of Arts and Sciences, Professor French has promoted interdisciplinary teaching and research, and has extended the scope of courses to cover Indian and South Asian intellectual traditions in the humanities and social sciences. Under his leadership, the School has launched a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science Honours programme, alongside an Integrated Masters in Life Sciences, and innovative Majors specialising in History, Economics, Psychology, Physics and Computer Science, as well as original Majors in Social and Political Sciences (SPS), and in Philosophy, History and Languages (PHL). In addition, they offer a PhD programme in Physics, in Life Sciences and in Humanities and Social Sciences. Since 2017, the School of Arts and Sciences has hosted more than 100 eminent academic and public policy specialists from across India and the world, ranging from ground-breaking young scholars to Nobel laureates. Professor French puts a particular emphasis on academic distinction, on a commitment to mentorship for students and faculty, and to advancing the research and local public value of the School in order to connect with the communities it serves.

• Developments in Indian electoral politics 2009-2016.
• Realignment in Indian foreign policy and strategy since 2014.
• The theoretical basis of biography as a provider of ‘total context’ in historical and qualitative social analysis, and the formal operation of biography in world history.
• Mid-Twentieth Century connections and disjunctures between the late colonial state and postcolonial nationalisms in South and West Asia, and the revivalist use of an ‘ancestralist’ past as a contemporary ideology.
• Primary research for the authorised biography of Doris Lessing, focussing on the Lessing Archive at the University of East Anglia.
• Narratives around AI in India and South Asia, in collaboration with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University.

Selected Book Publications

• The Golden Woman: The Authorized Biography of Doris Lessing (forthcoming 2022), New York: Knopf; London: Harper Collins; internationally in translation.
• India: A Portrait 2011, London: Allen Lane; New York: Knopf; New Delhi: Penguin; Lisbon: Temas e Debates (Portuguese); New Delhi: Penguin (Hindi); Amsterdam: Atlas (Dutch); Barcelona: Duomo (Spanish).
• The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul 2008, London: Picador; New York: Knopf; Barcelona: Duomo (Spanish); Beijing: CITIC (Chinese); Antwerp: Atlas (Dutch)
• Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land 2003, London: Harper Collins; New York: Knopf; Moscow ACT (Russian); Warsaw: Ushuaia (Polish); Paris: Albin Michel (French); Prague: BB Art (Czech); New Delhi: Penguin (Hindi)
• Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division 1997, London: Harper Collins; New Delhi: Harper Collins; New Delhi: Penguin (Hindi); Amsterdam: Atlas (Dutch)
• Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer 1994, London: Harper Collins; Milano: Sperling &; Kupfer (Italian); New Delhi: Penguin (Hindi); Malaysia: Marco Polo (Chinese)
• In 2011, Professor French compiled and published on open access a unique dataset of India’s ‘dynastic’ Members of Parliament, based on double-sourced information analysing the career route into the Lok Sabha of 545 MPs. It formed the basis of Chapter Four of the book India: A Portrait (2011), and has since been widely cited across academia and public policy, and by senior government ministers. It demonstrated statistically for the first time a correlation between age and heredity, party and heredity, and region and heredity in the functioning of Indian electoral democracy.

Selected Other Publications

• ‘Doris Lessing at 100: roving time and space’, Nature, Volume 574, 10 October 2019
• ‘On The Ground: The Unfolding of the 2014 General Election Campaign,’ in The Algebra of Warfare-Welfare: A Long View of India’s 2014 Election, Eds. Irfan Ahmad and Pralay Kanungo, Oxford University Press, 2019.
• ‘Can the Right be Liberal? A Moment of Reckoning,’ in Open, 13 July 2017 (cover)
• ‘Imagining British identity after Brexit,’ in Demos Quarterly, Renewal Britannia, London 2017
• ‘V. S. Naipaul and the British Tradition in Biography,’ in Effervescent Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, Ed. Roger Louis, London: I.B. Tauris; Austin: Ransom Center, 2017
• ‘Hereditary Politics is Thriving in India, but the Real Leaders Reached the Top by Other Routes,’ India in Transition (English and Hindi), January 27, 2014, Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at University of Pennsylvania
• ‘After the War’, Granta, Issue 125: Autumn 2013 (cover)
• ‘Parsing the Grammar of Anarchy,’ in Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower, Ed. McKinsey &; Company, Simon &; Schuster, New York 2013
• ‘Mohandas and the Unicorn.’ The National Interest, no. 114 (July/August 2011): 73-81
• ‘The Princely State of India’, Outlook, January 17, 2011 (cover)
• Patrick French’s work has been cited in journals including ‘Indian Historical Review’, ‘American Historical Review’, ‘Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History’, ‘Modern Asian Studies’, ‘Textual Practice’, ‘Estudios de Asia y Africa’, ‘Journal of Caribbean Literatures’, ‘Economic and Political Weekly’, ‘Asian Affairs’, ‘Past &; Present’, ‘Journal of Palestine Studies’, ‘Comparative Studies in Society and History’, ‘Pacific Affairs’ and ‘Business History Review’.