Biography
Syantani Chatterjee is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her research and teaching specializations are the anthropology of toxicity, anthropology of precarity, environmental anthropology, the anthropocene, feminist methodologies, and personhood and embodiment, with an expertise in South Asia and postcolonial studies. Her dissertation, The New Gateway of India: Toxicity, Belonging, and Governance in Contemporary Mumbai draws on 18 months of archival and ethnographic research in Mumbai (India) to study the material and non-material impacts on communities of living and working in toxic conditions. The Lindt Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the American Institute of Indian Studies’ Junior Fellowship for Dissertation Fieldwork, and Columbia University’s Dean’s Fellowship have funded her research. She received a Best Thesis Award in her M.A., and a Distinction in her M.Phil.