Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Chicago, died December 23, 2015 in Oakland, California, after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Rudolph, 85, was a past president of the American Political Science Association and the Association for Asian Studies, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Along with her husband and close collaborator Lloyd, Rudolph published numerous influential works that earned them the 2014 Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honor. The Rudolph’s extraordinary teaching and scholarship helped make the University of Chicago a leading institution for the study of India.
Rudolph’s work with her husband relied on careful qualitative analysis that incorporated topics and methods from other fields, including literature and psychology. The range of the Rudolph’s work was unusually broad, encompassing not only Indian politics but also comparative politics as a general field, with special interest in the political economy and political sociology of South Asia, state formation, Max Weber, political psychology, methodology, and the politics of category and culture.
Her major books include The Modernity of Tradition, Transnational Religion and Fading States; Education and Politics in India; In Pursuit of Lakshmi: the Political Economy of the Indian State; and Essays on Rajputana.
See more at University of Chicago News.
My condolences to the family of Professor Rudolph. I met and worked with her while I served as a Program Officer for the Social Science Research Council with the Committee on International Peace and Security. Professor Rudolph was a remarkable scholar whose commitment to the life of the mind was exemplary. Her book on Transnational Religion and Fading States demonstrated her willingness to engage with a wide range of perspectives in exploring the emergence of religion as a factor in reshaping the decades that saw the collapse of the Cold War and its emphasis upon secular ideologies of power. Her passing is a loss to the profession and her collaborators.