Dr. Shriya Patnaik has a PhD in International History and Politics (Summa cum Laude, no corrections) from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Switzerland, where her research has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation's Doc.CH and Gender Equality Grants, Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship, Swiss Network for International Studies, Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, Pierre du Bois Foundation, and Geneva Graduate Institute’s Community Scholarship. She is currently a research fellow at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg's Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Research Network at the University of Bern. Shriya has also been awarded the Swiss National Science Foundation's Postdoc.Mobility fellowship to the Universities of Nottingham and Heidelberg, which she will begin in May 2027.

Shriya additionally holds other research and teaching roles. She is currently a Research Associate at the Pierre du Bois Foundation in Switzerland, and is also a part of the United Nations’ Centenary of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations research project in Geneva. In her present capacity, she further works as an Adjunct Lecturer at Utkal University in India, where she delivers in-person and online lectures for the Department of History. Moreover, she works as a research affiliate with the Graduate Institute’s Gender Centre and the Global Migration Centre. Her research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals and in book chapters for edited volumes with Routledge, Taylor & Francis, Oxford University Press, Springer, and Palgrave Macmillan, among others. She is a Co-editor of a Special Issue for the Dance Chronicle journal (Taylor & Francis) titled "South Asia's Courtesan, Hereditary, and Temple Performers: Expanding Discourse and Disrupting Histories".

Shriya received her Bachelor’s in History from Cornell University (Magna cum Laude Honours) in 2014 as a Cornell Tata Scholar. She subsequently pursued a Double Masters’ (MA and MSc) in International History with a focus on Gender Studies from the Columbia University-London School of Economics Dual Degree MA-MSc program (with a Distinction) in 2017. During her undergraduate years, she was selected for an Exchange program at the University of Oxford’s Mansfield College on a full scholarship, where she undertook tutorials in History, Anthropology, and Political Science. Through her academic trajectory so far, Shriya has been closely involved in conducting archival, ethnographic, palaeographic, qualitative, and quantitative research for various data-driven projects, including for Cornell University’s Language Acquisition Lab, Cornell’s Future of Minority Studies Project, the LSE Women’s Library, Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Odisha State Archives' Digital History Project, and Odisha High Court and Judicial Archives.

In addition to her scholarly interests, Shriya has worked in the public policy and NGO sectors on gender and human rights projects across India, Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. These experiences have played a key role in shaping her research focus on women’s rights and minority rights initiatives at a transnational scale. In terms of her linguistic abilities, she is fully proficient in English, Hindi, and Odia, has a medium level of proficiency in Sanskrit, and has A2 level of proficiency in French.