Geography department, U. of Cambridge (UK)
https://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/people/barua/
Maan is an environmental and urban geographer whose research focuses on the economies, ontologies and politics of the living and material world. It fosters new conversations between political economy, posthumanism and postcolonial thought, developed through four arenas of inquiry: urban ecologies, urban surrounds, biocapital and postcolonial environments.
Maan leads a major ERC Horizon 2020 Starting Grant (2018-2024; £1.23 million) on Urban Ecologies, involving multiple partners and a research team across two continents. This work has culminated in his recent monograph Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology, published by the University of Minnesota Press (2023). His second book Plantation Worlds, interrogates planetary transformations through critical engagements with colonialism and race, and has been published by Duke University Press (2024). His work is in dialogue with cognate disciplines, especially anthropology.
Maan’s research has been enabled by numerous research grants (including from The British Academy, Wellcome Trust, Leverhulme Trust) and international collaborations (SciencePo, Paris; Freie University, Berlin). He has a close association with the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, where he has been a long-term adjunct faculty and through which he develops research capacity in India. He has a strong commitment toward environmental policy, contributing to the latter as a member of the IUCN/SSC’s Asian Elephant Specialist Group.
Prior to joining Cambridge, Maan was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Geography and Environment at the University of Oxford, where he also read for a DPhil and an MSc. In 2022, Maan was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his contributions to urban and environmental geography.
At present, Maan’s focus is on the metabolism of cities. He is working on a short book on urban wetlands and the politics of carcerality (provisionally titled “An Amphibious Urbanism“), drawing upon recent ethnographic work in Guwahati, northeast India.