Dr. Lav Kanoi (Ph.D. ’24) is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture (REEC) Initiative at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and a Lecturer in Anthropology at Yale University. 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, Dr. 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.
Dr. Kanoi’s research in environmental anthropology and the environmental humanities has been published in various prominent journals and in book collections such as Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability, Environment and Society: Advances in Research, and The SAGE Handbook of the Social Sciences among others. He is also a literary translator working across classical and contemporary Indian and European languages, and has published book translations of Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea from English to Hindi, Sukumar Ray’s Pagla Dashu stories from Bengali to Hindi, and the First Book of Virgil’s Aeneid from Latin to English. Dr. Kanoi feels strongly about the environment, cities, language(s), and the many different things that go into the making of higher education.