About

Nikhil Anand's research focuses on the political ecology of cities, explored through the different lives of water. His first book, Hydraulic City (Duke University Press 2017), examines the everyday ways in which cities and citizens are made through the management of water infrastructure in Mumbai. This work highlights how the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure demonstrate the emergence of citizenship through continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water, emphasizing the critical role infrastructures play in consolidating civic and social belonging. Anand's new research project, The Urban Sea, investigates how coastal cities are actively constituted through social and natural relationships with the sea, aiming to discover new paradigms for inhabiting coastal cities in the context of climate change. His broader work addresses the tensions between the promises of infrastructure—modernity and development—and their breakdowns, which reveal underlying issues of progress, equality, and economic growth. Through collaborative and interdisciplinary projects, Anand explores how urban processes, especially in coastal and river cities like Mumbai and Philadelphia, intersect with histories of vulnerability, inequality, and environmental change, seeking to imagine cities that thrive amid climate-changed waters by integrating social justice and non-human natures.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Geography
• Sociology
• Engineering
• Law
• Epistemology
• Mathematics
• Statistics
• History
• Medicine
• Operations research
• Environmental health
• Philosophy
• Archaeology
• Virology
• Econometrics

Selected publications

• ContextFocus: Activation Steering for Contextual Faithfulness in Large Language Models

  ArXiv.org · 2026-01-07

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Large Language Models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of parametric knowledge during pre-training. As world knowledge evolves, effective deployment increasingly depends on their ability to faithfully follow externally retrieved context. When such evidence conflicts with the model's internal knowledge, LLMs often default to memorized facts, producing unfaithful outputs. In this work, we introduce ContextFocus, a lightweight activation steering approach that improves context faithfulness in such knowledge-conflict settings while preserving fluency and efficiency. Unlike prior approaches, our solution requires no model finetuning and incurs minimal inference-time overhead, making it highly efficient. We evaluate ContextFocus on the ConFiQA benchmark, comparing it against strong baselines including ContextDPO, COIECD, and prompting-based methods. Furthermore, we show that our method is complementary to prompting strategies and remains effective on larger models. Extensive experiments show that ContextFocus significantly improves contextual-faithfulness. Our results highlight the effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency of ContextFocus in improving contextual-faithfulness of LLM outputs.

  PublisherOA PDF

• ContextFocus: Activation Steering for Contextual Faithfulness in Large Language Models

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-01-07

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Large Language Models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of parametric knowledge during pre-training. As world knowledge evolves, effective deployment increasingly depends on their ability to faithfully follow externally retrieved context. When such evidence conflicts with the model's internal knowledge, LLMs often default to memorized facts, producing unfaithful outputs. In this work, we introduce ContextFocus, a lightweight activation steering approach that improves context faithfulness in such knowledge-conflict settings while preserving fluency and efficiency. Unlike prior approaches, our solution requires no model finetuning and incurs minimal inference-time overhead, making it highly efficient. We evaluate ContextFocus on the ConFiQA benchmark, comparing it against strong baselines including ContextDPO, COIECD, and prompting-based methods. Furthermore, we show that our method is complementary to prompting strategies and remains effective on larger models. Extensive experiments show that ContextFocus significantly improves contextual-faithfulness. Our results highlight the effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency of ContextFocus in improving contextual-faithfulness of LLM outputs.

  PublisherDOI

• Evolutionary Optimization Based Augmentation of Lunar Powered Descent Guidance Law

  2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• After Coasts: Cartography, Desiccation, and Dwelling in Amphibious Worlds

  Annual Review of Anthropology · 2025-07-17 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  As cities and nation-states design massive coastal development projects, I show in this review how these projects require and produce emptied and flattened surfaces necessary for the workings of coloniality, racial capitalism, and enslavement, dispossessing amphibious modes of life and livelihood in their wake. Nevertheless, despite their accreted force (and also perhaps because of it), colonial and postcolonial projects to stabilize and concretize coasts are always falling apart. Their disrepair manifests how projects, and the lives and landscapes they make, continue to be situated in amphibious worlds. Building on the work of scholars in anthropology, geography, science and technology studies, and Black studies, I first draw attention to the spatial and temporal rhythms in which social groups dwell in amphibious terrain. Second, thinking with Kamu Brathwaite's formulation of tidalectics and Tiffany Lethabo King's formulation of shoals, I show how concepts of an amphibious anthropology lend themselves to reading the compromised yet consequent forces with which sedimented and sodden social and natural histories matter. Finally, I return to Peters & Steinberg's provocation of more-than-wet ontologies to unpack how an amphibious anthropology might register and theorize the permeability of the body and, in so doing, address the long-standing separations between environmental science and the health sciences.

  PublisherDOI

• The Space-Times of Urbanizing NatureHow Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens.Hillary Angelo. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 264 pp., 14 halftone illustrations. $30.00 paper (ISBN 9780226739045); $29.99 E-book (ISBN 9780226739182).Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice. Kian Goh. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021. 298 pp., 55 black-and-white illustrations. $35.00 paper (ISBN 9780262543057); $25.99 E-book (ISBN 9780262367059).

  The AAG Review of Books · 2024-04-02

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Oil Spill Classification: A Machine Learning Approach

  2024-07-10 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Oceans can be visually documented by satellite photos to show the size and effects of oil spills on the water's surface. Determining whether an oil spill is present in a particular maritime patch is the primary goal of this research. The best-fitting classifier for detecting oil spills in a given ocean patch has been determined by applying popular Machine Learning (ML) classifiers and boosting techniques, such as K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Cat-Boost (CB), Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree classifier, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB), Logistic Regression (LR), and Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB) in this work. In this classification, Cat-boost had the highest accuracy score of 0.984 and the highest precision of 0.989. K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) came next with an accuracy score of 0.9681. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves were also generated using Random Forest, giving an AUC of 0.9784.

  PublisherDOI

• Eviscerating the Sea

  Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East · 2024-05-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Contemporary infrastructure projects in the sea reterritorialize port environments, continuously discarding historic occupants and coastal occupations in their wake. In this article the authors dwell on the ongoing histories through which fish and fishers are eviscerated in Mumbai's seas via the proliferation of massive infrastructural operations currently being staged by the Indian state. In so doing, they make two arguments. First, they show how infrastructures at sea are accretive forms that are simultaneously articulated at different time scales. New infrastructures currently being built in the sea in postcolonial India only intensify the expropriations of colonial projects that were staged in the sea. Second, urban fishers work not only at sea but also on the dry land of the city. As chances for making livelihoods at sea are steadily foreclosed, fishers are increasingly turning to their small parcels of land in the city, exploring how and if these might be made real estate to secure their futures.

  PublisherDOI

• Hydrological Drought Forecasting Using Nonlinear ANN

  Lecture notes in civil engineering · 2024-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• <scp>SOUTH ASIAN URBAN CLIMATES</scp>: Towards Pluralistic Narratives and Expanded Lexicons

  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research · 2023-04-20 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. We look analytically and linguistically from this region to engage the terms ‘mahaul’, ‘mausam’ and ‘aab‐o‐hawa’ as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historic, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory and embodied registers. Gathered together, the stories scaffold a perspective on climate that connects concerns about broader structural conditions (mahaul); local and lived experiences in different temporal registers (mausam) and sociomaterial entanglements that demand new ways of knowing nature (aab‐o‐hawa). An expansive yet grounded conceptualization allows us to narrate individual cases and local climate stories in their multiplicity and difference, rather than through cumulative effects across much wider geographies. This essay on South Asian urban climates provides an analytical frame based on shared colonial history, and geographies connecting experiences of climate across fraught geopolitical borders. These diverse South Asian urbanisms provide evidence of a range of environmental vulnerabilities, while seeking possibilities in already existing climates—in the seas and airs that reorient the experience of land and atmosphere, in centering marginalized voices, in historical remnants to read contemporary urban change, in exploring planning agency grounded in local politics, and from the position of partial knowledge that being within urban climates entails.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acknowledgments

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Geography
  • History
  DOI

Recent grants

• Infrastructure, Planning, and Uncertainty on Urban Coastlines

  NSF · $237k · 2019–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Hannah Appel

  University of California, Los Angeles

  30 shared

• Rania Kassab Sweis

  27 shared

• Elif M. Babül

  Mount Holyoke College

  27 shared

• Robert Samet

  27 shared

• Austin Zeiderman

  26 shared

• Kedron Thomas

  University of Delaware

  25 shared

• Rodrigo Andrés

  Rockefeller University

  25 shared

• Aaron Shaw

  Harvard University

  25 shared

Awards & honors

• Junior Scholar Prize by the Anthropology and Environment Soc…