Lav Kanoi

Lav Kanoi is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer (Anthropology) with the Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture (REEC) Initiative at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. His research in environmental anthropology and the environmental humanities, drawing on the social and natural sciences, focuses on the social and environmental dimensions of cities and urban development. His doctoral dissertation research at the combined Department of Anthropology and School of the Environment PhD program at Yale University centered on changing waterscapes in India’s National Capital Region of Delhi, where, like many other large human settlements, the city struggles to manage water equitably and sustainably in the face of increasing water crises and climate change. At Yale, Kanoi has coordinated, and is involved with, a number of different research groups and research collectives in Environmental Anthropology, South Asian Studies, Religion and Ecology, and the Environmental Humanities. Kanoi is also 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. Kanoi feels strongly about the environment, cities, language(s), and the many different things that go into the making of higher education.

Select list of publications: 

2024. “Re-Constructing Restoration: A Critical Review of the Practice, Politics, and Process of Restoration in Diverse Ecologies.” Environment and Society 15. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2024.150102. [with P.B. Burow, Y. Gao,  A. Lim, K. Orrick, E.A. Singer, and M.R. Dove] 

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, ed. Shonaleeka Kaul. New Delhi: Routledge India, pp. 105-125. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003204848-10

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. The SAGE Handbook of the Social Sciences. 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.]