Nayanika
Mathur

About

I am Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, where I am jointly based in the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) and the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME). I am also a Governing Body Fellow of Wolfson College.

I was educated at the Universities of Delhi (BA and MA) and Cambridge (MPhil and PhD). Before joining Oxford in 2017, I held academic positions at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. I was also a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge. During 2022–23, I was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton.

At Oxford, I have served as Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS) and co-directed a TORCH research network on Climate Crisis Thinking for the Humanities and Social Sciences. I am a member of the steering committee of the Environmental Humanities Hub and currently lead a major John Fell Fund project, Mapping Climate Knowledges in India.

Research

State, governance, law, bureaucracy—and questions of method.

My work explores the state, governance, law, and bureaucracy through long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India. My first book, Paper Tiger, examines how the everyday life of the state makes law real, how ambitious development projects are converted into practice through paperwork and routine bureaucratic practices.

My second book, Crooked Cats, turns to the nonhuman world and the climate crisis. It asks how the state seeks to regulate big cats that have gone crooked, and what these crooked beasts might be telling us about a planet in crisis. While the book remains rooted in fieldwork in the Indian Himalaya, it also travels into urban India, tracing the wider political and environmental worlds within which human and nonhuman lives become entangled. If Paper Tiger asks how law and development become real through paperwork and the space of the sarkari daftar (government office), Crooked Cats asks how governance reaches into multispecies worlds and how those worlds, in turn, reshape our understanding of the Anthropocene.

More recently, my work has become increasingly concerned with questions of method.