Dr. Dilshanie Perera is a Lecturer in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where they teach writing courses focused on climate, data, and social justice. Their research examines the politics of weather and climate in South Asia and the United States. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, their work engages disciplines across the arts and humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Their current research project, “The Politics of Breathing,” aims to develop a genealogy of clean air in the United States through ethnographic and archival methods.
Dr. Perera received their PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2020. Their doctoral dissertation, entitled “Barometer Falling: Weather, Risk, and the Meteorological Imagination in Bangladesh,” highlighted findings from ethnographic fieldwork with government meteorologists and coastal rice-farming families in Bangladesh, and from archival research on historical cyclones in South Asia, to better understand how weather and environments are understood as problems of governance. They investigated how environmental risk is reframed in terms of the climate crisis in Bangladesh, and analyzed the social and political responses of Bangladeshi meteorologists, farmers, government officials, and activists to ecological change.
As a multimodal artist, they are working on a piece called Sectioning, which brings together memoir, ethnographic interviews, social practice art, and archival research to examine contemporary birth practices in the U.S., with a focus on cesarean section.