Veena Das is a research professor at the Johns Hopkins University and the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology. She has been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago, University of Edinburgh, University of Bern and Durham University UK, and was elected to Fellowship of the British Academy in 2019. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and sciences, and Academy of Scientists from Developing Counties. She was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and the Anders Retzius Award of the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography in 1995 and the Ghurye Award in 1977. She was awarded the Nessim Habif Prize by the University of Geneva (2014), Sudhindra Chakrobarty Award, University of Calcutta (2020) and GBD Eminent Scholar Recognition by the International Studies Association (2021).
Her most recent books are Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2007) Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (2015), Textures of the Ordinary, Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein (2020), Slum Acts (2022) and three co-edited volumes, The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy (2014), Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium (2015) and Politics of the Urban Poor (Special Issue, co-edited, 2015). Words and Words: A Lexicon for Dark Times (co-edited 2021), Details Matter: Anthropology, Aesthetics, Philosophy (co-edited, forthcoming). Das’s graduate students hold academic positions in ten different countries and have authored prize-winning books based on the dissertations they completed at Delhi and at Johns Hopkins.