Nielsen studied social anthropology in Copenhagen, obtaining his MA in 2005. After that, he moved to Norway to pursue a PhD in social anthropology at the University of Oslo’s Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM). His doctoral fieldwork was carried out with a rural social movement in the Indian state of West Bengal between 2007 and 2009 and focused on burning political issues related to land grabbing, state violence, and popular resistance. This study formed the basis of his PhD that was completed in 2014, and which later became the book Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India (Anthem Press, 2018).
Land and environmental conflicts in India have remained central themes in Nielsen’s research ever since. For his postdoctoral work carried out with the University of Bergen between 2014 and 2017, Nielsen turned to Goa where he studied conflicts over infrastructure development, while also developing an interest in mining-related conflicts in the same state. Analytically, his focus has increasingly turned towards political economy and agrarian Marxism, and on the intersection between big structures, large processes, and everyday lives. Although he considers himself a political anthropologist at heart, Nielsen often integrates insights from sociology, political science, the study of religions, development studies and area studies in his work. He joined the Department of Social Anthropology as an Associate Professor in 2019.
Over the past years, Nielsen’s research interests and ways of working have diversified considerably, but his empirical anchoring has always been India. In this context, he has written about gender relations, Hindu nationalism, consumption, caste and class, India’s beef industry, democracy and citizenship, subaltern as well as dynastic politics, cars, farmers’ movements, and coal imports. He regularly co-writes with scholars from other disciplines, with recent collaborative monographs including The Great Goa Land Grab (Goa1556, 2022), and Authoritarian Populism and Bovine Political Economy in Modi’s India (Routledge 2024). He is a regular commentator in the Norwegian and international media on current Indian affairs; the leader of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies; and a regular host on the popular Nordic Asia Podcast.