Dannah Dennis

Biography

Dannah Dennis is a Global Perspectives on Society Teaching Fellow at NYU Shanghai. She has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Virginia and a BA in History from the University of Baltimore. In 20162017, she was an instructor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the social and political anthropology of Nepal and South Asia. She has recently published articles on the politics of urban infrastructure in Kathmandu and on the nationalist significance of Nepali claims to Buddha’s birthplace, along with a piece of ethnographic fiction exploring the obligations of relationship in transnational Nepali middle-class families. Dr. Dennis's field work for her dissertation, "Nepali First: Citizenship and Nationalism in a New Secular Republic," was funded by the WennerGren Foundation. She was recently awarded a Senior Humanities Research Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers to begin fieldwork for a project which is tentatively titled "Bureaucratizing Equality: Nepal's Civil Service in Transition." She is a member of the American Anthropological Association, the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, and the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.

Research Interest

social and political anthropology of Nepal and South Asia