Co-Director, Program in Agrarian Studies
Joint Coordinator, Combined PhD Program in Anthropology and School of the Environment
My research spans environmental history and political anthropology of forests, agriculture, human-animal relations, and urban environments in India. I have also worked on the history and contemporary development of environmental law and jurisprudence in India. Over the years my publications have covered these topics and issues of circular migration, economic development, nationalism, state formation, cultural geography, the history of forestry sciences, and environmental ethics.
I have served on the editorial board of the American Ethnologist and the Journal of Peasant Studies. I was one of the founding editorial board members for Environment and History and Conservation and Society. I edit the “Culture, Place and Nature” Series at the University of Washington Press; with Anand Yang and Padma Kaimal I co-edit the Global South Asia Series, also at the University of Washington Press.
Selected Publications:
2023. [edited with Sarah Osterhoudt]. Sustaining Natures: An Environmental Anthropology Reader. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 386 pps.
2021. [edited with Anne Rademacher]. Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 213 pps.
2019. [edited with Ghazala Shahabuddin]. Nature Conservation in the New Economy: People, Wildlife and the Law in India. Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 291 pps.
2017. [edited with Anne Rademacher]. Cities, Towns and the Places of Nature in Asia. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 255 pps.
2017. ‘Courts, Public Cultures of Legality, and Urban Ecological Imagination in Delhi’ in Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds.), Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 137-161.
2016. ‘Space for Social Action in the Politics of Nature’ in Uday Chandra and Daniel Taghioff (eds.) Staking Claims: The Politics of Social Movements in Contemporary Rural India, Delhi: Oxford University Press
2015. ‘Ethics of Nature in Indian Environmental History’, in Modern Asian Studies, 49, 4 (July 2015): 1261 – 1310.
2014. [edited with Mahesh Rangarajan]. Shifting Landscapes: Animals, People and Mobility in India’s Environmental History. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 310 pps.
2013. [edited with Anne Rademacher]. Ecologies of Urbanism: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability in India . Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Subfield:
Sociocultural & School of the Environment
Degree(s):
Ph.D., Yale University, 1996