Lav Kanoi

Keywords: urban studies; development studies; environmental studies; anthropology of water;
postcolonial studies; environmental humanities; history and literature; language and linguistics;
India; South Asia

Lav Kanoi is a PhD Candidate in the combined Department of Anthropology and Yale School of
the Environment PhD program, where his current research centers on urban waterscapes in India.
Drawing on the social and natural sciences as well as the environmental humanities, this study
calls attention to the sociocultural, historical, political, and environmental aspects of water
management in contemporary Indian cities as cities and citizens seek to remake the spaces
around them and in which they live in their quest for sustainability, well-being, and meaningful
citizenship.
At Yale, Lav has coordinated a number of different research groups and research collectives in
Environmental Anthropology as well as South Asian Studies, and he also serves as the graduate
coordinator of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. Lav is a literary translator working
across classical and contemporary Indian and European languages, and has published academic
and creative translations of texts from Latin to English, and from Bengali and English to Hindi.
He is a former Young India Fellow and has previously worked as a management consultant with
the Boston Consulting Group, a public-sector education specialist with the Government of
Himachal Pradesh, and as a researcher and teacher at Jadavpur and Ashoka Universities. Lav
feels strongly about the environment, cities, language(s), and the many different things that go
into the making of higher education.

Select Publications

2023. ‘Myths of Purity and the Miracle of Water by the Banks of the Ganga-Yamuna’. In Myths
and Places: New Perspectives in Indian Cultural Geography, edited by Shonaleeka Kaul.
Routledge.

2022. ‘“What Is Infrastructure? What Does It Do?”: Anthropological Perspectives on
Infrastructure(s)’. Environmental Research: Infrastructure and
Sustainability 2. https://doi.org/10.1088/2634-4505/ac4429. [with V. Koh, A. Lim, S. Yamada,
and M.R. Dove]

2022. ‘Sustainability as a Moral Discourse: Its Shifting Meanings, Exclusions, and
Anxieties’. Sustainability 14 (5): 3095. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14053095. [with S. Yamada, V.
Koh, A. Lim, and M.R. Dove]

2021. ‘Locating the “Rural” in Anthropology’. In The SAGE Handbook of Cultural
Anthropology, edited by Lene Pedersen and Lisa Cliggett, 296–310.  SAGE
Publications. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529756449.n17. [with V. Koh, P. Burow, and M.R.
Dove]

2020.  Chaiwaad . Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press. [Hindi translation. Originally ‘The Book
of Tea’ in English by Kakuzo Okakura] 

2019. ‘Colonisation, College and Chai: Virgil’s Aeneid and Okakura’s The Book of Tea’. In India
in Translation, Translation in India, edited by G. J. V. Prasad. India: Bloomsbury.

2019. ‘Who Is in the Commons: Defining Community, Commons, and Time in Long-Term
Natural Resource Management’. In Global Perspectives on Long Term Community Resource
Management, edited by L.R. Lozny and T.H. McGovern. Switzerland: Springer. [with M.R.
Dove et al.]

2014.  Pagla Dashu . New Delhi: Vani Prakashan. [Hindi translation. Originally ‘Pagla Dashu’ in
Bengali by Sukumar Ray]

2013. The First Book of Virgil’s Aeneid Translated in to the Bengalee Language by Henry
Sargent: Being a Facsimile of the First Edition Published in 1810 from the Mission Press,
Serampore. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press. [English translation with Amlan Das Gupta.
Originally in Latin by Publius Vergilius Maro.]