Shirin M. Rai is Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies and the Director of Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (WICID). She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Prof Rai is an interdisciplinary scholar and has written extensively on issues of gender, governance and development and gender and political institutions. She is currently working on the impact of COVID-19 on older people and their carers in Coventry and Leicester and is currently writing two books - Depletion: the human cost of care (OUP) and Doing Politics Sideways (Routledge). She was Director of the Leverhulme Trust programme on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (2007-2011).