The Department of Geography, Environment and Society welcomes its newest faculty members, Assistant Professors Nikhil Anand and Daniel Griffin.
Nikhil Anand theorizes the dynamic social and environmental processes that form cities and states in the global South. Drawing on new approaches in urban geography, cultural anthropology and political ecology, his current project focuses on the production and maintenance of hydraulic infrastructures, and the social and environmental relations that they entail. Framed by popular and scholarly anxieties about the burgeoning cities of the global South on one hand, and the uncertain futures of water resources on the other, his recently submitted book manuscript, Infrapolitics: The Social Life of Water in Mumbai, is an ethnographic account of how urban water is made, moved, and subsequently delivered to marginalized residents in one of the world's largest cities. His new research follows water to new locations to theorize the political work of uncertainty and disgust in everyday life. He plans to teach courses on cities and urbanization, political ecology, the developmental state, and infrastructure.
Daniel Griffin is a biophysical geographer with interests in climate science, water resource issues, environmental dynamics and natural areas conservation. His research is largely focused on paleoclimatology, which is the study of natural climate variability from environmental proxy data. Dan is a field scientist with over fifteen years of experience developing and interpreting tree-ring records. He is now the third Geography faculty member at the
UMN Center for Dendrochronology. Dan's current work is focused on hydroclimatic change and variability in places like California, the American Southwest, and Guatemala. A recipient of the
NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dan was previously appointed at the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Dan is now affiliated with the University Honors Program
, and is currently teaching an honors freshman course in biogeography. In coming semesters, Dan plans to offer upper-division courses in climatology and conservation of natural resources.
