Anjana Ramkumar

Anjana Ramkumar is a PhD candidate in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. She is a nature-society scholar broadly interested in the intersection between agroecology, development, and rural worlds. Her work draws on and contributes to the study of political ecology, agrarian studies and contemporary South Asia. Her dissertation project examines the agroecological cultivation of traditional rice varieties in India to engage with questions of agrarian change, alternative development, and postcolonial subjectivities. She received a National University of Singapore Development grant in 2022 to support her research, and an honorable mention in 2022 for the Marleigh Grayer Ryan Student Writing Prize for her paper “Situating food sovereignty: Green Revolution, Agroecology, and Agrarian Development in India.” She works with Rachel Bezner-Kerr (chair), Jenny Goldstein, and Andrew Wilford. Anjana obtained her bachelors’ degree in Environmental Studies in 2016 and her master’s degree in Geography in 2019 from the National University of Singapore. A native of Singapore, she has conducted fieldwork in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Philippines and India through her years of training in the social sciences. Prior to graduate school, Anjana worked in Singapore’s foreign service, specializing in international climate change negotiations. She enjoys cooking, playing the violin and taking long walks in her down time.