A.y. 2021-2022
Neena Mahadev is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College. She has conducted fieldwork in Sri Lanka, and also in Singapore, with a focus on the theo-political interplay between Theravāda (Pāli) Buddhism, Pentecostal Christianity, and Roman Catholicism, and the innovations that arise within agonistic religious milieus. Her work appears in Current Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, Religion and Society, HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Religion, and Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. Currently, she serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Global Buddhism and is on the Series Board for New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity (Bloomsbury). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Max Planck Institute. Dr. Mahadev is finalizing her first book manuscript, Of Karma and Grace: Mediating Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka, for the series on Religion, Culture, and Public Life with Columbia University Press. The manuscript was awarded the 2021 Claremont Prize in Religion from IRCPL.
Lucinda Ramberg is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. Her research projects in South India have focused on the body as an artifact of culture and power in relation to questions of caste, sexuality, religiosity, and projects of social transformation. Her first book, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded several prizes. Her current book project, We Were Always Buddhist: Dalit Conversion and Sexual Modernity, investigates the sexual politics of lived Buddhism through an ethnography of religious conversion in contemporary South India. The research and writing of this book has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and the American Council for Learned Societies/Robert H. Ho Family Foundation for Buddhist Studies.
Angelantonio Grossi is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He is an anthropologist whose work reflects on questions of translation, coloniality, and religious conversion in the engagement between African spiritualists and digital infrastructures in an often-presumed Christian landscape. In his research, he interrogates common delineations of ethnic, linguistic, and geographical boundaries by foregrounding the role of Ghana-based spirit mediums in the mediatization and revaluation of traditions like Vodu across multi-continental geographies, including Afro-diasporic temporalities and experiences of blackness. At the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life he is completing his dissertation entitled Spirits in Circulation: Digital Media and Indigenous Spirituality in Post-Christian Ghana.
A.y. 2020-2021
Miriam Laytner is a PhD student in anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also a Mellon Humanities Public Fellow. Her research revolves around issues of power and identity in the context of climate crisis. More specifically, she is interested in narratives of place and belonging embedded in representations of the landscape of the United States. Her dissertation will examine religious and spiritual representations of nature and the non-human in rural Oklahoma. A trained oral historian, Miriam is also the Oral History and Documentation Fellow at the New York Academy of Sciences Anthropology Section, where she oversees documentation of the recent history of the Section and its relationships to feminist and progressive organizations in and around New York City.