Chandana Mathur

Dr. Chandana Mathur was educated at the University of Delhi and the New School for Social Research, New York, and has been teaching at the Maynooth University Department of Anthropology since 2003. She is a former Chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations (2016-18) and now a permanent member of its Advisory Board. More recently, she was the Vice-President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2021-23). She has been honoured with a Distinguished Service Award from the International Union for Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, and a Presidential Award from the American Anthropological Association. She has been a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Centre Norbert Elias, Marseille (2018-19) and at the University of Vienna (2021-22), as well as a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (2019-21).

Drawing on the perspectives of anthropological political economy and political ecology, her research focuses principally on the contemporary United States, South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. With the historian Deana Heath, she is the co-editor of the volume Communalism and Globalization in South Asia and Its Diaspora (2011: Routledge). Her published work has appeared in such journals as American Anthropologist, Critique of Anthropology, Dialectical Anthropology, Solar Energy, Wiley Interdisciplinary Review Essays – Water (WIREs Water), among others. She is a member of the editorial committee of the journal Dialectical Anthropology, and an Editorial Advisory Board member for Feminist Anthropology, Social Anthropology/ Anthropologie Sociale, and for sapiens.org, an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. For a fuller picture, see her interview in the June 2017 issue of American Anthropologist, where she reflects on her trajectory [IR Link]. 

She has participated in two transdisciplinary EU Horizon 2020 funded projects, WATERSPOUTT (2016-2020) and PANI_Water (2019-2024), contributing anthropological perspectives (as part of a Maynooth-based social science team) to research led by STEM scientists working on the solar disinfection of water. She has served as a review panel member for the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (2010-12) and currently does so for the European Research Council (since 2023). 

She has supervised/co-supervised 8 PhDs to completion, and was awarded a Research Ally Prize in 2021 by the Irish Research Council for her  work as a mentor. Five of her former and current doctoral students have been awarded postgraduate scholarships by the Irish Research Council, and one of them also received the Council's Eda Sagarra Medal of Excellence.