Lav Kanoi

Lav Kanoi is a PhD Candidate in the combined Department of Anthropology and Yale School of the Environment PhD program, where his current research centers on urban waterscapes in India. Drawing on the social and natural sciences as well as the environmental humanities, this study calls attention to the sociocultural, historical, political, and environmental aspects of water management in contemporary Indian cities as cities and citizens seek to remake the spaces around them and in which they live in their quest for sustainability, well-being, and meaningful citizenship.

At Yale, Lav has coordinated a number of different research groups and research collectives in Environmental Anthropology as well as South Asian Studies, and he also serves as the graduate coordinator of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program. Lav is a literary translator working across classical and contemporary Indian and European languages, and has published academic and creative translations of texts from Latin to English, and from Bengali and English to Hindi. He is a former Young India Fellow and has previously worked as a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group, a public-sector education specialist with the Government of Himachal Pradesh, and as a researcher and teacher at Jadavpur and Ashoka Universities. Lav feels strongly about the environment, cities, language(s), and the many different things that go into the making of higher education.

Select Publications

2023. “Myths of Purity and the Miracle of Water by the Banks of the Ganga-Yamuna.” In Myths and Places: New Perspectives in Indian Cultural Geography, ed. Shonaleeka Kaul. New Delhi: Routledge India, pp. 105-125. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003204848-10

2022. ‘“What Is Infrastructure? What Does It Do?”: Anthropological Perspectives on Infrastructure(s)’. Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability 2. https://doi.org/10.1088/2634-4505/ac4429. [with V. Koh, A. Lim, S. Yamada, and M.R. Dove]

2022. ‘Sustainability as a Moral Discourse: Its Shifting Meanings, Exclusions, and Anxieties’. Sustainability 14 (5): 3095. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14053095. [with S. Yamada, V. Koh, A. Lim, and M.R. Dove]

2021. ‘Locating the “Rural” in Anthropology’. In The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology, edited by Lene Pedersen and Lisa Cliggett, 296–310. The SAGE Handbook of the Social Sciences. SAGE Publications. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529756449.n17. [with V. Koh, P. Burow, and M.R. Dove]

2020. Chaiwaad. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press. [Hindi translation. Originally ‘The Book of Tea’ in English by Kakuzo Okakura] 

2019. ‘Colonisation, College and Chai: Virgil’s Aeneid and Okakura’s The Book of Tea’. In India in Translation, Translation in India, edited by G. J. V. Prasad. India: Bloomsbury.

2019. ‘Who Is in the Commons: Defining Community, Commons, and Time in Long-Term Natural Resource Management’. In Global Perspectives on Long Term Community Resource Management, edited by L.R. Lozny and T.H. McGovern. Switzerland: Springer. [with M.R. Dove et al.]

2014. Pagla Dashu. New Delhi: Vani Prakashan. [Hindi translation. Originally ‘Pagla Dashu’ in Bengali by Sukumar Ray]

2013. The First Book of Virgil’s Aeneid Translated in to the Bengalee Language by Henry Sargent: Being a Facsimile of the First Edition Published in 1810 from the Mission Press, Serampore. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press. [English translation with Amlan Das Gupta. Originally in Latin by Publius Vergilius Maro.]