I am a medical and sociocultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of several fields including feminist, postcolonial and queer theories; religion and secularism; medicine and the body; and South Asia. My research projects in South India and the United States have roots in longstanding engagements with the politics of sexuality, gender and religion. These projects have focused in particular on the body as an artifact of culture and power in relation to questions of sexual subjectivity, social transformation and citizenship projects. I have conducted research in the US on sexual ‘risk’ and transsexual medicine and in South India on ‘sacred prostitution’ (devadasi dedication) and Dalit conversion to Buddhism.

My first book, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion (Duke University Press, 2014), is an ethnography of a contemporary practice in which girls are married to a goddess. I take this ongoing practice and its reform as an occasion to consider what can count as religion and who and what marriage is for. In 2015, Given to the Goddess received the first Michelle Rosaldo best first book prize in Feminist Anthropology, the Ruth Benedict prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology, and the Clifford Geertz Prize for best book in the anthropology of religion from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. The book also received honorable mention for the best book in South Asian Studies from the Association for Asian Studies in 2016.

I serve as the director of graduate studies in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. In college and university service, I am a member of the core faculty of the Nilgiris Field Learning Center, a Cornell-Keystone Collaboration; a member of the Humanities Council, Society for the Humanities; a member of the Qualities of Life Working Group, Einaudi Center; a member of the steering committee for Faith, Hope and Knowledge: Interfaith Dialogues for Global Justice and Peace, Einaudi Center, and a member of the Provost’s Social Sciences Idea Panel, 2017-present.