Curriculum Vitae
Lawrence Cohen is a Professor in Anthropology and South and Southeast Asian Studies and the co-director of the Medical Anthropology Program. His primary training has been in social anthropology with additional training in geriatric medicine and in the study of religion. His research has been based in urban north India, primarily in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar but with additional work in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, and Uttarkand, as well as some work in Kuala Lumpur and Melaka, Malaysia. He has long worked on the aging body and its voice and the centrality of family decline as a dominant theme within postcolonial social science. His award-winning book No Aging in India: Alzheimers, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things, was the recipient of the Staley Prize, the Victor Turner Prize, and the American Ethnological Association Book Prize, and with Annette Leibing he co-edited Thinking about Dementia. More recent work on aging and the nation includes the essay "Old Woman" in The People of India. His current work on aging centers on youth and The Cockroach Janata Party. He has long worked on sexuality and gender in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and published many essays on marginalized sex/gender relations as embodiments of "the feudal" and central to regional political and social identity in the Purvanchal region. These essays include "Song for Pushkin," "Holi in Banaras," "Lucknow Noir," "The Gay Guru," and "What Mrs. Besahara Saw." He has long worked on renal transplantation, the Indian market in organs, and the relation of the surgical operation to modernity and development more generally, with many essays including "Where It Hurts," "The Other Kidney," "Migrant Supplementarity," "Accusations of Illiteracy," and "Ethical Publicity." He has long worked on biometrics and the development of the "Aadhaar card" in India, focused on how a nation becomes a database, with essays including "The Social De-duplicated," "The Nation, De-Duplicated," "India as Database," and "Duplicate, Leak, Deity." He has additional work on contemporary Ayurvedic medicine ("The Epistemological Carnival"), on Indian cinema ("Foreign Operations"), and on Covid ("The Colors of Rot," "Superimposition," "The Culling").
