Maan Barua

Maan Barua is based in Cambridge/United Kingdom.

His work examines the ontologies, economies and politics of the living and material world.

Born in Guwahati, Barua grew up in northeast India, where he studied zoology (BSc Hons, Dibrugarh University/India, 2007). He received a Felix Scholarship to pursue an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at the School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford/United Kingdom (2008), where he also read for a DPhil in Geography (Clarendon Scholarship, 2013). In 2018, Barua was appointed a university lecturer in human geography at the University of Cambridge. He is the recipient of an ERC Horizon 2020 Starting Grant (Urban Ecologies, 2018–2023), which seeks to reconfigure the meaning of urban life.

Drawing posthumanism, postcolonialism and critical political economy into conversation, Barua’s work focuses on three thematic areas: Urbanization, planetary transformations and capitalist natures. His work develops new methodologies, combining ethnography, ecology and ethology. Barua’s book Living Cities will be published shortly by Minnesota University Press (2023). He has completed a monograph on plantations and is currently focusing on metabolic life.