Professor Pragya Agarwal

Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural and data scientist and a visiting professor of social inequities and injustice at Loughborough University. Following a PhD from the University of Nottingham in the UK, she held the prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship and senior academic positions and visiting fellowships at University College London (UK), University of Temuco (Chile), RMIT (Melbourne), and Johns Hopkins University (USA). Her research has been funded by Royal Society, Wellcome Trust, EPSRC, ESRC, Society of Authors, and Leverhulme Trust. She was awarded a Crucible fellowship by NESTA for ‘innovative interdisciplinary research’, and a Transmission Prize in 2022 for ‘making big complex scientific ideas accessible’. In 2023-24, she has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of California-Irvine to investigate judicial bias. Pragya is the author of four widely acclaimed non-fiction books, Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias (Bloomsbury, 2020), Wish We Knew What To Say: Talking With Children about Race (Dialogue Books, 2020), and (M)otherhood: On the choices of being a woman (Canongate, 2021). Her latest book, Hysterical: Exploding the myth of gendered emotions, a historical and scientific analysis of emotions, is one of Waterstones, Telegraph and i paper’s 'best non-fiction books of 2022'. Her writing has also appeared in Guardian, Prospect, BBC Science Focus, Scientific American, WIRED and New Scientist amongst others, and her creative non-fiction in literary magazines such as Literary Hub, Florida Review and AEON. Pragya teaches creative non-fiction writing courses for Arvon and Irish Writers Centre. In 2023, she was invited to headline the M/OTHER festival at The Wheeler Centre (Melbourne) and speak at the All About Women festival at the Sydney Opera House. Pragya is a fellow of Royal Society of Arts, Royal Geographic Society and Royal Literary Fund.