Lav Kanoi (Ph.D. ‘24) is interested in the social-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 insecurity. As a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer (Anthropology) working on the Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture Initiative at the ISM, Kanoi will expand his dissertation on contemporary urban waterscapes, while also developing his research on sacred water in the modern city. Kanoi’s research in environmental anthropology and the environmental humanities has appeared in various notable 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. Kanoi is also a literary translator working between classical and contemporary Indian and European languages. He has previously 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.
