I was born and lived in India until the age of eighteen, when (after graduating from Woodstock School, Mussoorie, Uttarakhand) I came to the United States for higher education. I received my Ph.D. in South Asian Language and Literature from the University of Wisconsin and have carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India, including in Chhattisgarh, Hyderabad, Tirupati, and Mussoorie. My research projects have shared theoretical interests in everyday, vernacular religion and indigenous analytic terms and categories and performative and narrative commentaries. One goal of my research has been to bring unwritten traditions into the mainstream of the study and teaching of religion and Indian cultures, with a particular emphasis on their gendered performance and experience.

 

My research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, as well as by Emory University.

 

My publications include: On Mullingar Hill: Memory, Movement, and Belonging in a Himalayan Hill Station (2025); Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds (2020); Everyday Hinduism (2015); When the World Becomes Female: Possibilities of a South Indian Goddess (2013);  In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender & Vernacular Islam in South India (2006); and Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India (1996). I am also a co-editor of Boundaries of the Text: Performing the Epics in South and Southeast Asia (1991) and Oral Epics in India (1989).