Biography

Vikramaditya Thakur, Ph.D., is an assistant professor with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in sociocultural anthropology in 2014. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at London School of Economics and Political Science for two years. He was subsequently a Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Brown University, where he ran the project Displacement and the "Making of the Modern World in Middle East Studies," investigating 500 years of displacement around the world. Thakur joined the faculty at the University of Delaware in 2018.

Thakur studies the forced displacement and relocation of over 4,000 families of Bhils, a hill community in western India, due to the construction of one of the largest dams in the world on the Narmada River. This project is based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research using a historical perspective. Thakur has also studied the transformation of agriculture and changes in household economy among the Bhils. He is the co-author of Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India (Oxford University Press, India and Pluto Press, 2018).​ His research interests include development ​studies and environmental anthropology, informed by ethnographic fieldwork and archival research.​