Ashish Naik is a PhD candidate in European Global Studies at the University of Basel, where he is supervised by Corey Ross. His doctoral research, funded by the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship, is titled "Desert Frontiers: The Production of Emptiness from the British Raj to Decarbonisation," and traces the colonial genealogy of the 'wasteland' category and its reactivation across agrarian, developmental, and green regimes of accumulation in the Thar Desert. His work brings together environmental history, the history of capitalism, and political ecology, with a focus on land, water, and agrarian change in the arid landscapes of South Asia. Before Basel, he completed an MPhil at the University of Bergen with a thesis on the enclosure of water commons in Jaisalmer and its uneven burden on Dalit women and pastoral communities and spent several years in research roles in Rajasthan working on land tenure and agricultural commercialisation and on livelihoods with farming and Dalit communities in the state's south. His broader interests include temporality, environmental memory, and how communities register ecological change through narrative, ritual, and the marking of landscape.

Ashish Naik's research interests span the environmental history of South Asia, the history of capitalism, and political ecology — in particular, agrarian change; commons, enclosure, and the politics of land and water; pastoralism in arid environments; energy transitions and their social and ecological costs; and caste and gender in the distribution of environmental burdens. Methodologically, he is interested in combining archival and ethnographic research, and in oral history and environmental memory.

Basel Graduate School of History (BGSH), University of Basel