PPEH Welcomes New Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellows

August 27, 2021

We are delighted to announce our 2021-2022 Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellows. Former PPEH Graduate Fellow Pooja Nayak begins a new role as our Dissertation Completion Fellow and Nandita Badami is our newest PPEH Postdoctoral Fellow.

Read more about them and their work below!

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Pooja Nayak

Pooja Nayak is a Ph.D. candidate in South Asia Studies and Anthropology at Penn, with interests in how environments are made, the social worlds of science and technology practitioners, nature writing in Kannada, and public scholarship. She is currently completing her dissertation on the politics of biodiversity, industrial closure, and animal-human relations in South India. As a 2020-2021 PPEH Graduate Fellow, Pooja edited the "Arts of Noticing: Thinking with Doing" series. She has also worked as a reporter, editor, and documentary film-maker.

Nandita Badami 

Nandita Badami is a cultural anthropologist whose work examines the politics of sunlight as a modern industrial energy form. 

Her Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine was based on India’s ambitious National Solar Mission, and combined interests in anthropology, science and technology studies, the history of economics, the sociology of knowledge, and political theory. At Penn, she will begin work on her next project addressing circularity as an emerging relational form promoted in the name of ecological efficiency and environmental awareness.

A woman stands in front of a palm tree.