Assa Doron

Assa Doron's main areas of interest include, urban anthropology, development studies, the environment, and media and technology and public health. Much of his fieldwork was carried in Varanasi where he focused on the ritual economy of the river and questions of caste and identity politics in India. The study was published in the book, “Life on the Ganga” (Cambridge/Foundation 2013). His later work examined the wide adoption of mobile phones in India since the early 2000, and which led to a collaboration with historian Robin Jeffrey on a book titled, "The Great Indian Phone Book" (Harvard UP/C. Hurst, 2013 and published in India under the title Cellphone Nation). The book received wide international attention, with reviews in outlets including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal; Times Higher Education, Bloomberg, Economic & Political Weekly (EPW), Los Angeles Review of Books, India Today, LSE Review of Books, amongst others.

Doron and Jeffrey later co-authored "Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India" (Harvard University Press 2018) an interdisciplinary study of India’s changing relationship with waste. The book rIt was widely reviewed, including in Nature (‘beguiling and disturbing’), New Scientist (‘elegant and forceful’), Times Literary Supplement (‘admirably thorough…but also alive to a good story…’) The Australian (‘timely and incisive’), and The Wire (‘outstanding…engaging’). Doron's most recent book "A World of Resistance" (Belknap–Harvard University Press, 2026), co-authored with Alex Broom, looks at how everyday antibiotic use in India has become central to the global crisis of drug resistance.