Maan Barua works on the ontologies, politics and economies of the living and material world. His current work focuses on four themes of inquiry: (1) urban ecologies and urban surrounds; (2) metabolic life; (3) biocapital and (4) postcolonial environmental politics. Maan is the PI on an ERC Horizon 2020 Starting Grant (Urban Ecologies: Governing Nonhuman Life in Global Cities), and is the author of Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology published by the Minnesota University Press in 2023. His second monograph, Plantation Worlds, will be published by Duke University Press in 2024.

Keywords: cities, critical materialism, biocapital, Plantationocene, more-than-human