Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Adela Zhang is Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology and at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. She is a political and economic anthropologist whose work examines how communities dispossessed by large-scale resource extraction make lives for themselves amidst increasingly degraded environments. Her research traces the social, political, and economic effects of normalizing mining’s environmental and health harms in Peru’s southern Andes, where struggles over land and water are shaped by uncertainty about toxic exposure, shifting conceptions of property, and enduring hierarchies of race. Articles based on this research and other work in Peru have appeared in Environment and Planning D, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, and The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2025.