Profile
Dr. Vanessa Koh is an environmental anthropologist whose research and teaching engage topics such as the changing built environment, state power, sovereignty, and anthropogenic change. Her work asks what it means to make both land and environmental claims in an epoch marked by increasing precarity and anxiety. Her current book project is an ethnographic study of land reclamation in Singapore that examines how state and civil society efforts to physically transform the environment are intertwined with the making of the political landscape. Drawing on long-term research supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the monograph probes the different ways in which land is socially claimed, mediated, and contested.
Dr. Koh held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Princeton University's Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities from 2023-2024 and is currently a Voss Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University's Institute for Environment and Society. She received her Ph.D. with distinction from Yale University's joint program in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Environment in 2023.
Research Interests
Land, environmental justice, sovereignty, state formation, resource extraction, postcolonial urbanisms, climate change, Singapore, Southeast Asia