Leo Coleman

Leo Coleman is Chair of Social Science & Cultural Studies. A cultural anthropologist, he is the author of the book A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi (Cornell University Press, 2017), which explores how electric installations and great displays of industrial power–for both practical and ceremonial purposes–helped organize and transform urban political life and legal rights across the twentieth-century history of India’s capital city. Dr. Coleman has also published a wide array of articles and essays–in American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and other journals and edited volumes–on critical infrastructure studies, law and urban planning in the British Empire, and urban solitude. Recently, he co-edited (with Jessamyn Abel) a special issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias on “Infrastructures and Global Political Aesthetics” and contributed to a special issue on “Infrastructural Lives” in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology. Finally, Dr. Coleman maintains an active interest in the history of anthropological theory, as a problematic project of ethical understanding across societies, and its shifting role in the politics of empire, decolonization, and neoliberal development. He is currently working on a book about legalism in anthropology and in liberal societies.

PhD, Anthropology, Princeton University

MA (Hons), Social Anthropology & History of Art, University of St Andrews