I am a Professor in the South Asia Program, the Comparative Religion Program, and the International Studies Program at the University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies (JSIS). I hold the Henry M. Jackson Foundation Professorship in International Studies.  I am also a Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas, and an affiliate Professor in History and in Asian Languages and Literatures. I was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018. I held a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship from 2022-2023 and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities most recently from 2022-2023.

I teach and write about religion, history, and culture in South Asia, as well as theoretical issues in the study of religion in general and its intersection with historiography. I work with Marathi and Hindi materials, including textual, ethnographic, and visual/filmic sources. I work across time periods, from the contemporary to the medieval. My fields of publication include performance studies, film studies, religious studies, history, and contemporary politics.

I specialize in the study of Maharashtra from the second millennium CE to the present, ranging from the medieval period, through the colonial and modern periods, to the postcolonial era. I am teaching a graduate seminar this Fall on theories of religion (Relig 501). Click here for the most current draft of the syllabus.

My books include: Religion and Public Memory (Columbia University Press, 2008; winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions); Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (with Andy Rotman and William Elison, Harvard University Press, 2016); The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India (Columbia University Press, 2016); Bhakti and Power (University of Washington Press 2019), edited with Swapna Sharma and Jack Hawley; and The Yoga of Power: Yoga as Political Thought and Practice in India written with Sunila S. Kalé (Columbia University Press 2024).

I have been commissioned to write a biography on Savitribai and Jotirao Phule based on the poetry and other writing of Savitribai Phule.  The book, Savitribai and Jotirao Phule, will appear in 2026 in the Indian Lives series edited by Ramchandra Guha and published by HarperCollins India.