Reetika Subramanian awarded Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship

We are pleased to announce that Reetika Subramanian has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for her project Marriage as Adaptation Infrastructure: Kinship, Climate Risk & Gender Inequality. She will join the Grantham Research Institute in May 2027.

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships are awarded by the Leverhulme Trust to outstanding early-career researchers, providing three years of funding to support the development of an independent research career.

Describing her research, Reetika said: “Marriage is one of humanity’s most enduring institutions, often mobilised in times of crisis as a survival strategy. In South Asia, among the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, marriage is near-universal and has profound implications for equity, yet its role in responding to climate stress remains poorly understood. This project develops a framework for analysing marriage as an infrastructure of adaptation: a way households manage mobility, secure resources, redistribute labour and renegotiate power when formal systems of support are absent, inaccessible or inadequate. Drawing on comparative, intergenerational research in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, it examines how marriage practices reduce, spread or shift climate-related risks.”

During the Fellowship, Reetika will be working towards developing a framework for studying marriage as an infrastructure of adaptation, drawing on comparative ethnographic research as well as scholarship on kinship, gender and climate adaptation

She added: “I hope this fellowship will not only change how we think about climate adaptation, but also who gets to shape that conversation. By showing how marriage can both strengthen resilience and deepen inequality, I hope to broaden adaptation debates beyond infrastructure and technology.”

Reetika is currently a Senior Research Associate in the School of Global Development at the University of East Anglia, where her research explores gender, labour migration and climate adaptation across South Asia. She hosts the Climate Brides Podcast and is the author of the forthcoming Brides of Drought: Cane, Climate and Conjugality in Western India (Cambridge University Press & Assessment). In 2025, she was selected as a BBC–AHRC New Generation Thinker. She completed her PhD in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2024 as a Gates Cambridge Scholar.