The Schools of Interdisciplinary Area Studies and Anthropology and Museum Ethnography are delighted to announce the appointment of Nayanika Mathur as Associate Professor of the Anthropology of South Asia.
Nayanika completed her BA and MA at the University of Delhi and her MPhil and PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She has been awarded research fellowships by the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy at Cambridge's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) and taught Social Anthropology at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. She is an Anthropologist of South Asia with wide-ranging research and teaching interests in the anthropology of politics, development, environment, law, human-animal studies, and research methods.Nayanika is the author of Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and the co-editor of Remaking the Public Good: A New Anthropology of Bureaucracy (Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2015). Nayanika is currently writing her second monograph centred upon human-big cat conflict in South Asia, tentatively entitled Crooked Cats: Human-Big Cat Entanglements in the Anthropocene. Crooked Cats describes how humans share space with big cats that might - but also might not - be predatory. In addition to this new research on multi species ethnography and the Anthropocene, Nayanika is developing a second project that explores the effects of new technologies in the everyday working of government in India.
Nayanika will take up her position on 1st October 2017.