My research interests lie in affect in political and religious mobilization, political violence, subaltern politics in South Asia and critical anthropologies of state and development.
My dissertation entitled “Violence in the Indian Pastoral: Development, Religion and Indigeneity in Orissa” outlines how forces of old and new temporalities intersect to produce intense ethnoreligious violence in Kandhamal, Orissa. Specifically, I examine how more recent processes of Hindu nationalist mobilization, development initiatives of state and non state actors and growing awareness of the Constitution’s privileged construction of the tribal indigenous status lend new affective intensities to older, latent tensions arising from Hindu upper caste exploitation and ethnic rivalries, leading Hindu Kandhas to engage in violence against Christian Paanas in Kandhamal. In so doing, my research illustrates the complex logics and affective convergences created at the intersection of economic, religious and juridical forces that incite ethnoreligious violence. Moreover, it tracks the formation of a violent tribal subaltern who is increasingly deriving political agency from participation in, rather than resistance to, hegemonic politics and statist processes.

My teaching interests include courses on Indigenous Communities and Religious Politics, Critical Anthropologies of State and Development, Political Identities and Ethnic Categories in South Asia, and Ethnographic Writing.
Most recently, I taught in the College Social Sciences Core Sequence entitled Power, Identity and Resistance. The course aimed to equip students with an understanding of the relationship between politics, violence and the liberal state through the works of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Foucault, Freud, Fanon, King, Arendt and Asad.
I also received a Bernice Neugarten Prize Lectureship this year that enabled me to teach me a class of my own design on the anthropology of structural violence. In this class, students critically examined structural forces such as public health, development, urban planning and immigration that abet entrenched socioeconomic disparities as well as the role of photography and anthropological texts in conveying suffering in situations of structural violence.
In the past, I have also taught classes on psychological anthropology, qualitative research methods in the social sciences and academic writing.