Professor Dove is the Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology, Professor of Anthropology, Curator of Anthropology in the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Co-Coordinator of the joint doctoral degree program between YSE and the Department of Anthropology, and member of the founding Steering Committee of Yale’s new Climate and Energy Institute.
His research focuses on the environmental relations of local communities, especially in South and Southeast Asia.
Over the past 36 years, he has spent more than a dozen years in the field in Asia, carrying out long-term research on human ecology in Borneo and Java, developing government research capacity in Indonesia, and advising the Pakistan Forest Service on social forestry policies.
His most recent books are Conserving Nature in Culture: Case Studies from Southeast Asia (co-edited with P. Sajise and A. Doolittle, Yale Southeast Asia Program, 2005), Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader (coedited with C. Carpenter, Blackwell, 2007), Southeast Asian Grasslands: Understanding a Folk Landscape (editor, New York Botanical Gardens Press 2008), The Banana Tree at the Gate: The History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo (Yale University Press, 2011), and Complicating Conservation: Beyond the Sacred Forest (coedited with P.E. Sajise and A. Doolittle, Duke University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a book on the history of the anthropological study of climate change and another book (co-authored with D. Kammen) on The Anthropology and Physics of Conservation and Development.
Research and teaching interests include the anthropology of climate change and the cultural and political aspects of natural hazards and disasters; political dimensions of resource degradation; indigenous environmental knowledge; contemporary and historical environmental relations in South and Southeast Asia; the study of developmental and environmental institutions, discourses, and movements; and the sociology of resource-related sciences.
Professor Dove sits on the advisory boards of Yale’s Agrarian Studies Program, Council on South Asian Studies, Council on Southeast Asian Studies, and the International Affairs Council.