The Idea of Nature

This talk Naveeda Khan will present the context and major arguments of her recently published book River Life and the Upspring of Nature based on five years of fieldwork in the riverine chars of northern Bangladesh.  

Naveeda Khan is associate professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, where she also sits on the board of the Center for Islamic Studies and serves as affiliate faculty for the Undergraduate Program in Environmental Science and Studies.  Her research spans riverine lives and national climate policy in Bangladesh, UN led global climate governance processes, German romanticism, Bengali and Urdu literature and writings on the environment.  She is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (2012) River Life and the Upspring of Nature (2022) and In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (2023) and ed-itor of Beyond Crisis: Reevaluating Pakistan (2010).  Naveeda has also published numerous journal articles and book chapters and has edited three special issues/subsections of the journals Anthropology and Humanism, Anthropological Theory, and Contributions to Indian Sociology.  She is working on two manuscripts “Householding in Motion: Char Lives and Livelihoods in Northern Bangladesh” and “Schelling and the Romantic Method.”