Ida Birkvad

I am a Departmental Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) and at Somerville College. Prior to joining DPIR in 2026, I was an LSE Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). I received my PhD in International Relations from Queen Mary, University of London in 2023.

I am a scholar of International Relations, International political theory, and colonial history, with a particular interest in theorising the historic relationship between race, class, caste, gender, and sexuality.

My current book manuscript, The Global Aryan: Transnational Hierarchies in British India, traces the idea of the Aryan race back to its imperial roots in the encounter between British imperialists and Hindu upper-caste elites, from early colonisation in the eighteenth century to Indian independence in the mid-twentieth century. The book analyses key ideas and infrastructures that have given rise to contemporary alliances between Western reactionary politics and Hindu supremacism. I have published on this research in Millennium: Journal of International Studies.

My new manuscript project, Romantic Authoritarianism of the South, interrogates the centrality of the Romantic movement to contemporary postcolonial politics. With an empirical focus on authoritarian regimes in the Global South, I understanding Romanticism as a heterogenous set of global intellectual lineages exceeding the political spectrum as well as conventional notions of imperial metropole and periphery.

Finally, I also hold a keen interest in interpretivist research methodologies, especially thinking about how we as scholars of global politics make judgments and pronouncements across scales of time and space, and between the abstract and the concrete. I have published on this research in European Journal of International Relations.

Teaching

I convene the MPhil paper on Historical and Interpretive Methods, lecture on the MPhil paper on Research Design and Methods, and teach the MPhil Core paper, as well as the undergraduate paper on International Relations. 

I am the proud recipient of two LSE Class Teacher Awards.