The University of British Columbia
UBC - A Place of Mind
The University of British Columbia Vancouver campus
Sara Shneiderman
  • Home
  • Research
    • Current Research
    • Past Research
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Edited Books
    • Journal Articles
    • Book Chapters
    • Guest-Edited Collections
    • Opeds, media, blog posts, reviews, and other publications
    • Working Papers
  • Teaching
    • Current
    • Previous courses taught at UBC
    • Past courses taught at Yale
  • Media
  • Click here to learn about this multidisciplinary research partnership

    I am the Principal Investigator on a multi-year SSHRC partnership development grant focused on expertise, labour and mobility in Nepal’s post-conflict, post-disaster reconstruction.  

  • The Affective Potentialities and Politics of Ethnicity, Inc. in Restructuring Nepal

    Click above to read my book chapter in Ethnicity, Commodity, In/Corporation, edited by Meiu, Comaroff and Comaroff.

  • Disaster Financialization: Earthquakes, Cashflows and Shifting Household Economies in Nepal

    Click above to read our co-authored journal article in Development and Change.

  • Learning from disasters: Nepal copes with coronavirus pandemic 5 years after earthquake

    Click above to read our co-authored op-ed in The Conversation.

  • Forging Community through Disaster Response: Nepali Canadians and the 2015 Earthquakes

    Click above to read our co-authored journal article from BC Studies.

  • Click here to read Working Papers

    I am an editor for the Working Paper Series Reconstructing Nepal: Scholarly Approaches.

  • Click here for information on recent disaster-related events

  • Click here to watch Peter Wall Scholar Series presentation

    I discuss the context, objectives, and significance of an ongoing multidisciplinary research partnership on Nepal’s post-earthquake reconstruction, of which I am Principal Investigator.

  • Click here for more information about Darjeeling Reconsidered

    “With this collection, Townsend Middleton and Sara Shneiderman upend outdated myths in favour of rigorous new scholarship.” – Manjushree Thapa

  • Click here for more information about Rituals of Ethnicity

    Winner of the 2017 James Fisher Prize. All book royalties will be contributed to organizations supporting Thangmi communities to rebuild in the wake of the 2015 earthquakes.

I am a socio-cultural anthropologist with long-term ethnographic commitments in the Himalayas and South Asia (Nepal, India, and Tibetan areas of China), and emerging research engagements in British Columbia, Canada. I serve as Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology as well as in UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs/Institute of Asian Research. Broadly speaking, my research explores how social transformation is shaped by dynamics of citizenship and belonging (in relation to Indigenous, ethnic, religious and gender identities); cross-border mobility; conflict and political mobilization; territory and land use; development discourses and practices; and disaster aftermath and preparedness. Current research projects include a transdisciplinary SSHRC Partnership Development Grant focused on Nepal’s post-earthquake reconstruction; an ethnography of “post-conflict” state restructuring in Nepal; an exploration of trans-Himalayan citizenship across the historical and contemporary borders of India, China, and Nepal; participation in a University of Toronto-based project on infrastructure and development in Nepal’s agrarian districts; and collaboration in a Yale University-based project on urbanization and land use change in the Himalayas. I am in the early stages of two new research projects in British Columbia: one focused on the sociopolitical dimensions of disaster preparedness and governance; and the other about Nepali-Canadian experiences, in collaboration with the Nepal Cultural Society of BC.

My first book is titled Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). An ethnography focusing on the cross-border circulation of Thangmi people and their ideas about ethnic, national, religious and political identity, Rituals of Ethnicity offers new explanations for the powerful persistence of ethnicity as a category of identification today despite the increasing realities of mobile, translocal lives. The book is based on over a decade of ethnographic research with diverse members of the Thangmi community in the Dolakha and Sindhupalchok districts of central-eastern Nepal, as well as in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, India, and the neighboring state of Sikkim. All royalties from the sale of the book are donated to organizations supporting Thangmi communities of Dolakha and Sindhupalchok to rebuild after the 2015 earthquakes devastated their villages.

Darjeeling Reconsidered: Histories, Politics, Environments (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a volume that I co-edited with Townsend Middleton (University of North Carolina). I have also published several articles on the themes of Nepal’s Maoist movement; ethnic classification, affirmative action, and the politics of recognition in South Asia; and borders and citizenship in the Himalaya. I am currently preparing another manuscript that presents Thangmi ritual texts in Nepali and English translation. This is a collaborative project with an indigenous Thangmi researcher, a Nepali translator, and a linguistic anthropologist.

Multimedia technologies are at the core of my ethnographic methodology, and I am a founding member of the Digital Himalaya Project.

I received my PhD (2009) and MA (2004) from Cornell University, following a BA with Honors from Brown University in both Anthropology and Religious Studies (1997). Before coming to UBC I was an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Yale University from 2011-2014, and a Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge, from 2009-2011. My research has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon Foundation, the British Academy, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the following programs at UBC: the Hampton Fund, the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Fostering Research Partnerships Fund.

At UBC, I serve on the Steering Committee of the UBC Himalaya Program, through which I coordinate a Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) grant (2017-2020_ to further develop the Himalaya Program’s community-engaged language courses in Nepali and Tibetan, and related interdisciplinary course offerings in Himalayan Studies. I am also a member of the Executive Committee of the Centre for India and South Asia Research, for which I served as Co-Director from 2017-2019. In 2017-2018 I was a Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

Tweets by @sshneiderman
Department of Anthropology
Vancouver Campus
6303 NW Marine Drive
Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1
Tel 604 822 4387
Website anth.ubc.ca/faculty/sara-shneiderman/
Email sara.shneiderman@ubc.ca
Back to top
The University of British Columbia
  • Emergency Procedures |
  • Terms of Use |
  • Copyright |
  • Accessibility