Research

My research examines the politics of weather and climate in South Asia and the United States. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, my work engages disciplines across the arts and 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 a Lecturer in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach writing courses focused on climate and social justice.