Anne Rademacher

Anne Rademacher serves as Professor and Chair of Sustainable Urban Environments at the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, Technical University of Munich (since 2024), and maintains affiliation as an Affiliated Researcher at LMU Munich's Rachel Carson Center. Previously, she held professorial positions in anthropology and environmental studies at New York University from 2005 to 2023.

She earned her PhD in environmental studies and cultural anthropology from Yale University (2005), establishing foundational expertise in urban-environmental dynamics.

Rademacher's research critically investigates how historical narratives, belonging ideologies, and knowledge politics shape urban environmental transformations in South Asian metropolises. Her work synthesizes cultural anthropology with urban ecology to analyze sustainability struggles in Kathmandu (documented in Reigning the River, 2011) and Mumbai (explored in Building Green, 2017), emphasizing socio-cultural dimensions of ecological change.

Her recent publications reveal a decisive shift toward interdisciplinary ecological frameworks, advocating for pluralistic approaches that bridge sociocultural perspectives with scientific ecology. This trajectory examines dynamic socio-ecological processes in urban contexts while challenging singular ecological narratives through concepts like "moral ecology" and "coproduction" of urban environments.

Rademacher has co-edited three volumes in the Ecologies of Urbanism series and the 2021 volume Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities, significantly contributing to comparative urban environmental scholarship.

Her research leadership includes the 2019 Rachel Carson Center project "Moral Ecology and the (Re)Making of Cities: Forging an Urban Future in Mumbai," demonstrating sustained engagement with South Asian urban sustainability challenges through collaborative international frameworks.