• Public Policy and Governance, With Special Interest in Last Mile Issues
• History of British India, Specifically Post 1857 (Up to 1947)
• Measurement Indices of Governance at the National and Sub-national Level
• Administration Structures at District Level

C K Mathew is a Visiting Faculty at Azim Premji University.

He is a retired Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer from the 1977 batch of Rajasthan cadre and was Chief Secretary of the State in 2012 and 2013.

In his early career in the IAS, he has worked in a number of assignments including that of Deputy Secretary in the Department of Personnel, District Collector in two districts of Rajasthan, Managing Director of the Rajasthan State Marketing Federation, Special Secretary in the Finance (Revenue) Department, Secretary to the Government in the Departments of Irrigation, Mines, Education, Energy, Information Technology, Disaster Management, Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister of Rajasthan and Additional Chief Secretary in the Finance Department. His last assignment in Government was as Chairman of the Rajasthan State Road Transport Corporation in Rajasthan. 

Post retirement, he worked for about four years as Senior Fellow in the Public Affairs Centre, Bengaluru where he developed an index for the measurement of the quality of governance in the states of India, known as the Public Affairs Index. For a short while, he was also Special Rapporteur for the southern states under the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).

Currently, he is a member of the Managing Committee of a few Delhi Public Schools in Karnataka and Rajasthan. He is also a member of the National Working Committee of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church. He also continues as a member of the Governing Board of the Mar Baselios Christian College of Engineering at Peermade, Kerala, and the Mission Board College at Tumkur. 

Recently, he has also been inducted as a member of the Central Board of the Bharat Sevak Samaj (BSS). He is also a Member of the Board of an international education foundation for girl child education called Educate Girls Globally.

He has a Master’s degree in English Literature after which he obtained a doctorate in English Literature. His doctoral thesis was on ​‘Symbolism in the selected poems of Emily Dickinson.’ The thesis was also published as a book. He has also written two novels as well as two non-fiction books, the latest of which was published by Azim Premji University.