Amrita Kurian

Amrita Kurian is a non-resident visiting scholar with the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), University of Pennsylvania. Her research, which spans expertise, agricultural markets, and monocultural ecologies, offers a humanistic critique of expert interventions in India’s agri-commodity markets.

Dr. Kurian’s book manuscript, In Pursuit of Quality: Experts, Affects, and the Politics of Transforming Agrarian Geographies in Postcolonial India, uses an affective framework to show how state expertise inevitably shapes farm subjectivities for the benefit of neoliberal markets. Her research draws on an ethnographic study of the cigarette tobacco sector in Andhra Pradesh to highlight the increasing degradation of rural environments and mounting threats to farm livelihoods. Dr. Kurian’s forthcoming project is centered around the iconic Guntur chili. Foregrounding the oral histories of laboring women, this study will connect the anthropology of food to ongoing debates around agricultural sustainability and climate migration, offering new insights into ways that consumer cultures and labor regimes continue to shape global markets today.

Dr. Kurian holds a PhD in Anthropology from UC San Diego and an M.Phil. in Sociology from Delhi University. Her peer-reviewed essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in the Journal of Cultural Anthropology, Science, Technology and Human Values, and Geoforum. She has written public-facing articles for India in Transition, Scroll.in, and Platypus (the official blog of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing). Dr. Kurian has taught sociocultural anthropology at UC San Diego from 2020-2022. She has extensive experience in the Indian development sector, working on projects related to tobacco cessation, microfinance, un-housed women, and conflict resolution.