Political anthropologist Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury is associate professor of anthropology at Amherst College. Her research and writing focus on the affective and aesthetic dimensions of postcolonial democracies, especially in the context of popular sovereignty and political communication.
Her first book, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (2019), is an ethnography of the crowd.
At Kellogg, Chowdhury will work on a book project that explores the category of the mob and its relationship to infrastructural development in Bangladesh. This project dwells on the social and political life of the longest river bridge in Bangladesh in order to understand how ega-infrastructure is increasingly a strategy through which authoritarian regimes seek populist legitimacy.
Her other works in progress include a special co-edited issue on women populist leaders in South Asia which aims to advance the debates around contemporary populism beyond masculinist charisma. Her other ongoing research offers a cultural history of sacrifice and development by drawing on fictional accounts of human sacrifice for the sake of infrastructural projects, particularly bridges.
Chowdhury is the book review editor (South Asia) for the Journal of Asian Studies and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies. She holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.