Paras Arora

Paras Arora is an anthropologist, artist, and writer from Delhi, India. Their doctoral dissertation, ‘Neurodivergent Futures’, explores how the ageing of neurodivergent individuals into adulthood is experienced, anticipated, and oriented in contemporary India. Attending to the varied forms of aspirations, exhaustions, and rehabilitations that coalesce around neurodivergent adulthood in urban India, Arora has conducted over twenty months of continuous and six months of preliminary ethnographic fieldwork. During this research in the field, Arora held a Visiting Doctoral Fellowship at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, Delhi. Staying with their layered positionality, Arora blends illustrative, literary, analytical, and ruminative genres in their ethnographic craft. 

Arora’s research has been consistently supported by a wide range of external and intramural awards. Most prominently, in recognition of their potential in leading the humanities and interpretive social sciences in newer directions, Arora became one of the first scholars from India to be awarded the Dissertation Innovation Fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies and Mellon Foundation in 2024. Other organizations that have funded Arora’s research include the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, King Center on Global Development, Society for Psychological Anthropology, Robert Lemelson Foundation, Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford School of Medicine, Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education, Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, and Fondation pour l’étude des relations internationales en Suisse.

For their tremendous service and dedication in providing excellent classroom instruction to undergraduate students, they were awarded the Centennial Teaching Award by the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences in 2023. Arora has also been a Chappell Lougee Mentor in 2024 and 2026 with the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education to mentor Stanford students to pursue their first independent research projects. In 2024, Arora was also awarded the Robert Bayard Textor Award for Outstanding Creativity in Anthropology. In the past, Arora served as the graduate co-chair for the South Asia Working Group at the Stanford Center for South Asia, the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Medical Humanities at the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Anthropology Lunch Talk Series at the Stanford Department of Anthropology. 

Arora holds an M.A. degree in Anthropology from Stanford University, an M.A. degree in Anthropology and Sociology from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and a B.A. degree with Honours in Political Science from Hindu College, University of Delhi.