Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan is inaugural Singh Professor

Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, recently designated as the inaugural Dinakar Singh Professor of India and South Asia Studies, is noted for his interdisciplinary research focusing on the colonial and contemporary history and anthropology of forests and wildlife conservation in South Asia, particularly India.

His work spans environmental history, political anthropology, cultural geography, development studies, and science studies. His books, as the author or co-editor, include “Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India” (1999), “Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India” (2000), “Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India” (2003), “Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia” (2006), “The State in India After Liberalization” (2010), and the first two volumes of “India’s Environmental History,” published in 2011, with a third volume in preparation. 

At Yale, Sivaramakrishnan is a professor of anthropology and of forestry and environmental studies, and he is co-director of the Program in Agrarian Studies. He also serves as chair of the South Asian Studies Council of the MacMillan Center.

Sivaramakrishnan, who earned his Ph.D. at Yale in 1996, is currently working on several projects including essays on India’s terrestrial  environmental history; the comparative study of postcolonial nature conservation in the tropical world; urban ecology in metropolitan India; the anthropology of law and justice in India; and new research on law, civil society, and environmental sustainability in India, with case studiesi from the National Capital Territory of Delhi.

He is on the board of directors of the Association for Asian Studies, of which he was president 2010-2011, serves on the editorial board of American Ethnologist, and is a member of the international advisory board of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

The Dinakar Singh Professorship was established through a gift by Dinakar Singh ’90, one of the early leadership supporters of the Yale India Initiative.