Calynn Dowler

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

Calynn Dowler is an assistant professor in the Religious Studies department and the Climate and Environmental Studies program. She is a cultural anthropologist who works across the fields of the anthropology of religion, environmental and climate anthropology, and South Asian Studies. Her research explores how people experience, conceptualize, and respond to transformations in the more-than-human ecologies of West Bengal, India’s Sundarbans delta. Thinking with and through water’s relational qualities, her current project explores people’s complex and shifting relations with other people, with nonhuman nature, and with the delta’s ecologically embedded deities, ghosts, and spirits. Specifically, she focuses on how these relationships are changing amid processes of capital-intensive agrarian development and intensifying climate change.

She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Undercurrents: Anthropocene Stories from India’s Sundarbans Delta. This project has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA, the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, the Global Religion Research Initiative, and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Hunt Fellowship.