Dilshanie Perera

Dilshanie Perera is a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer whose work examines the politics of the climate crisis and its relationship to pervasive and durable forms of inequality and dispossession. Dilshanie’s research takes a broad view of risk temporalities, emphasizing the multiple histories and enduring inequities that structure hazard and vulnerability in particular places. Their doctoral dissertation, titled Barometer Falling: Weather, Risk, and the Meteorological Imagination, examined changing perceptions of risk in Bangladesh — a postcolonial context grappling with the present-day effects of climate change, where weather and landscape have historically been construed as problems of governance. 

Dilshanie holds a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University, an MA from the New School for Social Research, and a BA from the University of Chicago. Prior to coming to Columbia, Dilshanie was the Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at the Climate Museum, the first museum in the U.S. dedicated to inspiring action on the climate crisis.

This fellowship is supported by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies.