Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Ezra Rashkow
2026-2027
Home institution
Montclair State University, US
Country of origin (home institution)
United States
Discipline(s)
Cultural studies; Modern history; Others
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies; Identity; Other
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Ezra Rashkow is a scholar of modern South Asia, environmental history, and the history of anthropology. His work explores the intersection of colonial knowledge, conservation, and indigenous history. Grounded in extensive fieldwork in India, his research examines how conservation discourses shape the relationship between cultural and biological diversity.
He is the author of The Nature of Endangerment in India (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Memory, Identity and the Colonial Encounter in India (Routledge, 2017).
Currently associate professor of history at Montclair State University (US), he was previously a lecturer at the University of Virginia (US) and a research associate at Columbia University's South Asia Institute (US). He received his MA and PhD from SOAS, University of London (UK).
Research Project
People Parks: Protecting Indigenous Wilderness
Most histories of national parks and Indigenous peoples focus on “fortress conservation,” dispossession, and the creation of human-free wilderness. This project explores a very different tradition: reserves designed to integrate people as subjects of conservation itself.
Swiss conservationist Paul Sarasin once termed this approach anthropologischer Naturschutz (“anthropological nature preservation”). From George Catlin’s 1830s vision of a “nation's park, containing man and beast” to early 20th-century European conservation networks, the project studies the convergence of environmental and ethnographic salvage. Global case studies include efforts to preserve supposedly co-endangered pygmies and gorillas in 1920s Belgian Congo, Verrier Elwin’s 1939 call for a “sort of national park” for the “tribes of Central India,” and the Xingu Indigenous Park in 1960s Brazil.
Tracking the metamorphosis of these “people parks” into “postcolonial parks,” the project analyzes how Indigenous-led initiatives are today reclaiming protected areas for political sovereignty. Ultimately, this transdisciplinary research exposes the colonial logics that continue to shape global debates over biocultural diversity and Indigenous rights.
Research Interests:
national parks; indigenous; human-free wilderness; conservation; postcolonial