Nusrat S. Chowdhury

I am an anthropologist interested in questions of politics and mediation, particularly in the entanglement of popular sovereignty and political communication. My recent interests are in political affect, populism, rumor, infrastructural development and democracy. I received my PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and have been a Member at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during 2020-21. My first book, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford University Press 2019) is an ethnography of the crowd. My current book project explores the entanglements of sovereignty and sacrifice in the lived materiality of populist authoritarianism, or what I loosely describe as ''infrastructural populism'. I am the book review editor (South Asia) of Journal of Asian Studies and am on the editorial board of Journal of Bangladesh Studies. During 2020-23, I served as an elected member of the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.