Nikhil Anand

Nikhil Anand is an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on cities, infrastructure, state power and climate change. He addresses these questions by studying the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water. His first book, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Politics in Mumbai (Duke University Press 2017), examines the everyday ways in which cities and citizens are made through the everyday management of water infrastructure. Following his interest in infrastructure studies in political anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies, Anand co-edited (with Hannah Appel and Akhil Gupta) The Promise of Infrastructure (Duke University Press 2018). The book shows how infrastructure provides a generative analytic and site to rethink questions of time, development and politics in different parts of the world. As a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College in 2022-23, he is currently working on a new book. Titled Urban Sea, the book decenters the grounds of urban planning by drawing attention to the ways in which climate-changed seas are remaking coastal cities today.