Prajakti Kalra

Prajakti Kalra is the Research Officer for the Cambridge Central Asia Forum, Jesus College and the Administrator for the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. She was an Affiliated Lecturer in the Centre of Development Studies until 2023.

She was a Researcher and the Events and Communications Officer on the RCUK funded GCRF COMPASS project 'Comprehensive Capacity Building in Eastern Neighbourhood and Central Asia: research integration, impact governance and sustainable communities' 2018-2021. She has trained as a historian, political scientist and a psychologist. Her interests are in the areas of the history of Eurasia, specifically the Mongol Empire and Central Asia. She has worked extensively on regional and international organisations (OSCE, OIC, SCO, Eurasian Economic Union and the Belt and Road Initiative) in the present day. Her focus is locating avenues of communication and exchanges based on historical precedents and bringing local narratives into global speak in order to best facilitate interaction and knowledge production.

Her key publications are a monograph entitled the ‘The Silk Road and the Political Economy of the Mongol Empire’ (Routledge, 2018); Pax Mongolica: Trade and Traders in the Mongol Empire' in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian Commercial History edited by S. Levi (Forthcoming OUP, 2020); ‘Asiatic Roots and the Rootedness of the Eurasian Project’ in ‘The Eurasian project and Europe: Regional Discontinuities and Geopolitics’, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 and ‘Uzbek Relations with the Countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council in modern and pre-modern times,’ (in Russia and CIS Relations with the Gulf Region Current Trends in Political and Economic Dynamics, Gulf Research Centre, 2009). She is the research, administrative and social coordinator for the Cambridge Central Asia Forum.