Professor Srinivas Wins Guggenheim Fellowship for Monograph on Water Sustainability

Professor Tulasi Srinivas has won a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship for 2025-2026 to complete a monograph titled, Burning Waters: An Anthropology of Possible Futures, a decades-long study of water sustainability, climate change, and caste in her hometown of Bangalore, India.

Srinivas is a professor of Anthropology, Religion and Transnational Studies at Emerson’s Marlboro Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, and is affiliated with the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia (BUCSA) in the Pardee School of Global Studies.

“It’s an incredible honor and distinction to be chosen by your peers for this time to pursue research single mindedly,” Srinivas said. “I love teaching and my students are so inspiring, but having a full year to complete my book on water sustainability is truly a gift!”

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, celebrating its centenary year, seeks to allow “exceptional individuals” to pursue scholarship in any field of knowledge and the creation in any art form, under “the freest possible conditions.” Each year, the Guggenheim Foundation awards approximately 175 fellowships to scholars and artists making their mark in the social sciences, the natural sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants, Guggenheim Fellows are tapped on the basis of prior career achievement and exceptional promise.

Srinivas, a sociocultural anthropologist and professor of religion, has already received a slew of honors, grants, and fellowships for her work including a fellowship to the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University in 2016, and a LUCE- ACLS grant in 2019, as well as support from the National Endowment of the Humanities. 

Srinivas says she is “honored and grateful” to be the recipient of this prestigious award, which she won in the Anthropology and South Asia Studies category.

“I have always been committed to writing in a way that provoke readers to feel the nature of the world, as much as think about it. The urgency of the problem of climate change and looming water scarcity at this moment of rupture, suggests ways to think about and write about life,” Srinivas said. “At this moment, I feel the weight of having to tell stories of small moments of repair and possible futures that are deeply embedded in my work.”

Emersonians who previously have won a Guggenheim Fellowship include Visual and Media Arts Professor Kathryn Ramey in Film-Video, and Writing, Literature and Publishing (WLP) Distinguished Professor Jerald Walker in Literature in 2022; former WLP Chair Daniel Tobin for Poetry and WLP Distinguished Professor Jabari Asim in General Nonfiction in 2009; as well as Elaine McMillion Sheldon, MFA ‘13 for the Film-Video category. WLP Professor Emeritus Pablo Medina and alum Denise Duhamel ‘84 were selected as poetry fellows in 2014 and 2020, respectively.

Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted over $400 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.

The Boston Globe covered the announcement.