Amogh Dhar Sharma

Amogh’s research interests focus on the interface between technology and democratic politics, with particular emphasis on election campaigns, political communication, and digital transformations in South Asia. His first monograph – The Backstage of Democracy: India’s Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them – is under contract with Cambridge University Press and is slated for publication in 2024. This book provides one of the first academic analyses of the ‘professionals’ who work behind-the-scenes in India’s election campaign – the dizzying world of political consulting firms, spin-doctors, pollsters, Big Data analysts, and social media influencers. By mapping this changing landscape of electioneering, Amogh’s research highlights the need to rethink our conceptual understanding of how political parties and campaigns function and reveals how technological shifts have re-shaped the political culture of citizens.

During the academic year 2021/22, he was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship by UKRI’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), which allowed him to conduct further research on ‘data-driven campaigning’ and the ‘datafication’ of everyday practices in contemporary India. In the past, he has worked as a Departmental Lecturer in Modern South Asian Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and has held a Stipendiary Lectureship in Politics at The Queen’s College, Oxford. He has a vast experience of teaching a range of modules at both the undergraduate and graduate level and has supervised several M.Sc. And M.Phil. dissertations. 
For his next research project, Amogh will be studying the origin and trajectory of opinion polls and psephology in Indian politics. Through this research, he is keen to trace the forgotten role of the individuals and organisations that helped popularise the science of opinion polling in the country after independence and study how statistical knowledge and technocratic prowess came to interact with the turbulent unpredictability of India’s democratic politics. He has received seed funding from the John Fell Fund for this project and is keen to collaborate with other academics and knowledge partners.