Calynn Dowler

Graduated Spring 2022

Research Interests

South Asia, Sundarbans, West Bengal, India; water; morality & ethics; personhood & identity; religion & environment; anthropology of development; climate change

About

Calynn Dowler’s research lies at the intersection of environmental anthropology, religious studies, and the anthropology of development. Her dissertation explores changing material and moral entanglements with water in the Sundarbans delta of West Bengal, India. Calynn’s project employs archival and ethnographic methods to understand shifting discourses and practices relating to water among Hindu, Muslim, and Christian fishers and farmers on a riverine island. In this religiously and ethnically diverse setting, relations with the deltaic waterscape have historically been animated by engagements with the nonhuman animals, deities, ghosts, and spirits which dwell there, generating shared reservoirs of moral meaning and ethical orientation. In recent years, however, religious reform, changes in water rights and access, development initiatives, and climate change have begun to transform relationships among people, water, and the sacred to an unprecedented degree. Calynn’s research explores the effects of these changes on senses of place and personhood, religious identity, and environmental ethics.

Calynn holds a BA in Political Science and German from Gettysburg College. She completed her MA in Migration Studies as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Sussex in 2011-12. Her MA dissertation explored interpretations of Islamic alms-giving (zakat) among members of the Bangladeshi diaspora active in transnational faith-based NGOs in Tower Hamlets, London.

Awards

• Notre Dame-Templeton Global Religion Research Initiative (GRRI) Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2020-21)
• Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship (2018-19)
• American Institute of Bangladesh Studies Junior Research Fellowship (2019)
• Boston University Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship (2016, 2019)
• Pardee Center Graduate Summer Fellow (2017)
• American Institute of Indian Studies Language Fellowship, Bengali (2016-2017)
• Critical Language Scholarship (CLS), Bengali (2016)
• CLS Alumni Development Fund Grant, Bengali (2016)
• Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, Bengali (2015)
• Boston University Dean’s Fellowship (2014)

Publications

Peer-Reviewed

• 2019 Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (Yale University Press 2019), by Sudipta Sen in Asian Ethnology 78/2: 500-503.

Non-Peer Reviewed

• 2020 “Water and Human-Nonhuman Agency in India’s Sundarbans,” The Newsletter, 85, Spring 2020. International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University.