Anthony Acciavatti – Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River

Speaker: Anthony Acciavatti, Yale University

Beyond the urban density of Mumbai and the IT centers of Bangalore and Hyderabad lies the Ganges River basin, the world’s most densely populated river basin. Not only is it densely populated, agriculturally productive, and monsoonal, but also one of the most hyper-engineered landscapes on the planet. Presenting original research from his award-winning book, Ganges Water Machine (2015), Anthony Acciavatti will present how and why this basin became a laboratory for testing out and building a new culture around water management. In particular, he will share why he spent a decade walking and boating across the Ganges and combing through dusty archives to write the first environmental history of the basin in half a century, but also why it led him to develop new ways of mapping and visualizing environmental change.

Free and open to the public. A book signing will follow the talk.

Anthony Acciavatti is trained as a historian, geographer, and architect. A Fulbright Fellowship as well as grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation and Harvard University have supported his work on the Ganges. He has taught at Columbia and Princeton universities and currently teaches at Yale University.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Science and Society.