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), where I hold a College of Arts and Sciences Professorship. I am also a Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas, and an affiliate Professor in History and in Asian Languages and Literatures. I serve as the Director of the Center for Global Studies and Associate Director of JSIS. I was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018.

Summer Teaching: I am teaching Yoga: Past and Present (Relig/CHID 120) this Summer 2022. This is an entirely online asynchronous course.  You have find a draft of the syllabus here.

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); 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); and Bhakti and Power (University of Washington Press 2019), edited with Swapna Sharma and Jack Hawley.

The “Preface” and “Introduction” of The Quotidian Revolution is available for download here.

I am also writing a book with Professor Sunila S. Kale on Yoga as a Political Idea to be published by Columbia University Press. You can read a few pieces we’ve written on the Wire, as well as essays in The Oxford History of Hinduism (2020) on “Legal Yoga”; in Political Theologies and Development in Asia (2020) on “The Yogic Ethic and the Spirit of Development”; and in At Home and Abroad (forthcoming in 2021) on “The Cultural Politics of Yoga in India and the United States.”

My current work is a book on the religious and political thought of Savitribai (1831-1897) and Jotirao Phule (1827-1890) expressed through their Marathi poetry.