Rate My Professor Assa Doron

Professor Assa Doron is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, at the Australian National University. He holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and specializes in urban anthropology, development studies, the environment, public health, media, and technology, with a particular focus on contemporary India and South Asia. His research examines cultural dynamics surrounding technological change, urbanization, sanitation, waste management, identity politics, religion, ethnographic practice, new media, recycling, and antimicrobial resistance. Doron has made significant contributions to understanding environmental challenges and public health crises in the region, including projects such as 'Superbugs' in India: Antimicrobial resistance, inequality and development (2019–2025, Principal Investigator), Recycling Modernity: An anthropological study of India's mobile phone repair and recycling economies (2012–2018, PI), and Toxic Flows: Examining Toxicity in Asia's River Basins (2021–2022, Co-Investigator).

Doron's career includes appointments as Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2012–2016), Founding Director of the ANU South Asia Research Institute until 2017, and Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney (2021–2026). He has received major awards, including the 2022 Reid Prize from the Asian Studies Association of Australia for Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India (2018, Harvard University Press, co-authored with Robin Jeffrey), a citation for the 2020 President’s Book Prize, the 2013/14 Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia Early Career Research Prize, and the 2012 ARC Future Fellowship. Key publications also include The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life (2013, Harvard University Press, with Robin Jeffrey), Life on the Ganga: Boatmen and the Ritual Economy of Banaras (2013, Cambridge University Press), and forthcoming A World of Resistance: India and the Global Antibiotics Crisis (2026, Belknap-Harvard University Press, with Alex Broom). His scholarship has been featured in The Economist, The Guardian, Nature, and other outlets, and he has supervised over a dozen PhDs to completion while shaping discourse on waste, animals, microbes, and public health in South Asia.