Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

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Vanessa Koh

Voss Postdoctoral Research Associate in Environment and Society
vanessa_koh@brown.edu
Research Interests Land, Environmental justice, Resources, State formation, Sovereignty, Postcolonial urbanisms, Political ecology, Singapore, Southeast Asia

Biography

Vanessa Koh is an anthropologist whose ethnographic research focuses on the nexus between land reclamation, sovereignty, and climate change in Singapore. She studies what it means to make both land and environmental claims in an epoch marked by increasing precarity. Before coming to Brown, she received her Ph.D. with distinction from Yale University's Department of Anthropology and School of the Environment in 2023 and held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University from 2023 to 2024.
 
She will join Hunter College of the City University of New York as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the fall of 2026. 

Selected publications

  • 2025. “Growing Sustainable Capitalism: The Environmental Politics of Agri-Tech in Singapore.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. doi.org/10.1177/0308518X251323148
  • 2022. “Sustainability as a Moral Discourse: Its Shifting Meanings, Exclusions, and Anxieties.” With S. Yamada, L. Kanoi, A. Lim, M.R. Dove. Sustainability 14(5):3095. doi.org/10.3390/su14053095
  • 2022. “‘What is infrastructure? What does it do?’: Anthropological Perspectives on the Workings of Infrastructure(s).” With L. Kanoi, A. Lim, S. Yamada, M.R. Dove. Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability 2(1):012002. doi.org/10.1088/2634-4505/ac4429

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