Priya Agarwal graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with honors in 2021. She received a B.A. in Ethics, History, and Public Policy with a minor in Business Administration. At Carnegie Mellon she founded and led CMU Women in Politics, an organization which supports diversity in politics by connecting students with professional resources, mentorship, and volunteering opportunities. As president of CMU WIP, she also co-founded CMU Votes, a coalition of political clubs dedicated to promoting civic engagement on campus. She spent the spring semester of her sophomore year in Washington, D.C. as part of CMU’s Washington Semester Program, where she took classes while interning part-time with the United Nations Foundation’s Policy Planning Department. At the conclusion of her semester in D.C., she co-authored an article on election security for the CMU International Relations and Politics (CIRP) Journal. Her senior capstone project was a policy proposal detailing potential solutions for the school-to-prison pipeline in Allegheny County.

After graduating a year early from Carnegie Mellon, Priya pursued her graduate studies at the University of Bremen in Germany, where she earned her M.A. in Global Governance and Social Theory. During her first year of graduate school, she assisted a faculty member with a book project exploring the intersections of AI and international human rights law. She also worked as an editorial assistant at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschun, where she copyedited a publication titled Coastal Urbanities: Mobilities, Meanings, Manoeuvrings. She spent her final semester of graduate school studying European and Comparative Law at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa’s Law School. Her M.A. thesis analyzes compares a selection of films from Bollywood and Hollywood in a social and political context to illustrate how the portrayal of Muslim characters in global cinema evolved after 9/11.

Priya has additionally interned at the U.S. House of Representatives and TASSC International, a D.C.-based international human rights organization dedicated to the abolition of torture. She is fluent in English and Hindi, with basic proficiency in Spanish and some familiarity with Portuguese and German. She loves romance novels, horror movies, and a very strong cup of coffee. After law school, she hopes to pursue a career in international law.