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The Department of
Asian Studies

Mabel Denzin Gergan

Assistant Professor of Asian Studies

Mabel Denzin Gergan is a human geographer by training; she is a scholar of environmental justice, indigeneity, and race. Her research and teaching are grounded in the Indian Himalaya and attend to the racial and colonial logics underlying Indigenous communities’ disproportionate exposure to environmental risk and vulnerability. She is the founding member of an editorial and writing collective, Desirable Futures that brings together scholars theorizing colonial constructions of time and futurity at the intersection of Black, Indigenous, and decolonial geographies.

Born in Sikkim, India, she has lived and worked extensively in the Eastern (Sikkim) and Western (Uttarakhand and Ladakh) Himalayas. She holds her PhD from the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining Vanderbilt, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State University.

Specializations

  • Environmental Justice

  • Tribal/Indigenous theorization

  • Race & Indigeneity in South Asia

  • Hydropower and Disasters


Representative Publications

Gergan, M. D. (2025). The universal meets the Himalayan particular: Indigeneity, race, and decolonization in India. Critical Asian Studies, 57(4), 535-559.

Gergan, M. D., Gupta, P., Lookabaugh, L., McMillan, C., Serrano, C., Smith, S., & Vasudevan, P. (2024). Desirable futures: Time as possibility, practice, politics. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 42(1), 3-16.

Gergan, M. D., & Curley, A. (2023). Indigenous youth and decolonial futures: Energy and environmentalism among the Diné in the Navajo Nation and the Lepchas of Sikkim, India. Antipode, 55(3), 749-769.

Gergan, M., Smith, S., & Vasudevan, P. (2020). Earth beyond repair: Race and apocalypse in collective imagination. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(1), 91-110.

Gergan, M. D. (2017). Living with earthquakes and angry deities at the Himalayan borderlands. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107(2), 490-498.