Shylashri Shankar was previously an Assistant Professor in the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She has held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center on Religion and Democracy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. She was a Frank C Irwin Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, a President's Fellow at Columbia University, and a Fellow at the German and American Young Scholars Institute 2003/2004 on "Secularization and Religion". She has been a consultant for the World Bank, the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Health Organisation. She contributes regularly to newspapers in the mainstream Indian press on a range of issues including India’s foreign policy, South Asian and Middle East politics, judiciary and rights, ethnic conflict, and politics and impact of anti-poverty programs.

Her current research areas include the use of science in criminal and anti-terror court cases, secularism and constitutions, migration of ideas between judiciaries, the politics of implementing anti-poverty programs like the national rural employment guarantee scheme, the politics of urbanization and coalitions of the poor.