Research

My research examines the politics of weather and climate in South Asia and the United States. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, I am committed to interdisciplinary study. My work engages disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

I received my PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2020. My doctoral dissertation, entitled “Barometer Falling: Weather, Risk, and the Meteorological Imagination in Bangladesh,” highlighted findings from ethnographic fieldwork with government meteorologists and coastal rice-farming families in Bangladesh, and from archival research on historical cyclones in South Asia, to better understand how weather and environments are understood as problems of governance. I investigated how environmental risk is reframed in terms of the climate crisis in Bangladesh, and analyzed the social and political responses of Bangladeshi meteorologists, farmers, government officials, and activists to ecological change.

My current research project, “The Politics of Breathing,” aims to develop a genealogy of “clean air” in the United States through ethnographic and archival methods.

I am currently an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow based at Columbia University where I am the Climate Humanities Fellow in the Center for Science and Society and a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology.