Religious Studies Archives

Eric Villalobos

Eric Villalobos is a fourth-year PhD student in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. His research uses ethnographic and historical methodologies to examine the so-called “semi-renunciant” yati monastic lineages within Mūrtipūjaka Śvetāmbara Jainism in North India. This project takes him through the history of Indian monasticism, astrology, mantra science, and the colonial encounter with South Asian Indigenous medical systems. Eric received his BA in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his MA in South Asian area studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Eric’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the historical collaboration between Rajasthani kingdoms and Jain merchant communities in promoting Jain monks as medical practitioners during the colonial era. He is seeking answers as to how and why Jain monks, supported by Rajasthani kings and the Jain merchant community, transformed modern Āyurveda into a distinctly Hindu-identified medical science. To this end, he is conducting research in Rajasthan State Archives at Bikaner, examining the royal court documents of the Rajput kingdoms, especially of Bikaner, Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Udaipur. Beyond this, he is gathering oral histories about Jain monastic rest houses which functioned as traditional medical houses during the colonial period.

David St. John

David St. John is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside, in the Department for the Study of Religion. His research interests include identity-making practices, end-of-life rituals, religious and constitutional law, decolonial theory in South Asia, South Asian history, gendered and ontological knowledge systems, and religious ethics in contemporary practice.

David’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining the history of Jain identity building and self-representation during India’s late British colonial period. It is focusing on Champat Rai Jain (1867–1942), a leading lay Jain intellectual of the time, who promoted the development of a universal Jain identity. For the project, David is analyzing Champat Rai’s published works, contracts from publishing houses, and other archival materials. The aim of such an analysis is to show how Jain concerns evolved into strategies that shaped the way Jain identity was legally constructed.

Kristen Miller

Kristen Miller is a religious studies PhD candidate at Arizona State University, from where she has a master’s degree. Her research focuses on contemporary religion in northern India using an interdisciplinary approach that combines historical and ethnographic methods. She has presented her research at national and international conferences, including the American Academy of Religion, on topics such as the continued influence of scolonial legacies on contemporary religious practices. Over the last four years, Kristen has been studying Hindi and Urdu. In 2025, she participated in the American Institute of Indian Studies Summer Urdu Language Program in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Before completing her graduate studies, she had managed several USAID-funded projects in Jordan, Sudan, and Djibouti to promote civil society and gender equality.

Kristen’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on dargah visitation in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. Dargahs are grave shrines of blessed Sufi saints. Renowned dargahs often attract millions of visitors annually, both Hindus and Muslims. Kristen’s research is studying how dargahs are productive spaces of meaning-making for visitors. She is particularly interested in urban dargahs as community spaces within rapidly developing Indian cities. Drawing on ethnographic methods, Kristen is conducting participant observation and interviews with dargah visitors to explore a diversity of modes of engagement with urban religious space.

Deonnie Moodie

Dr. Deonnie Moodie is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is an ethnographer and historian of religion specializing in South Asia and its global connections. She received her BA in international studies from Hope College and her master’s and PhD degrees in South Asian religions from Harvard University. Her research has been supported by the National Humanities Center, the Henry Luce Foundation, numerous research awards from the University of Oklahoma, and a previous Fulbright-Nehru Student Researcher grant.

Dr. Moodie is the author of The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāț and Kolkata (Oxford University Press, 2018) and has co-edited special issues for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (with Kirsten Wesselhoeft, 2021) and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (with Cassie Adcock, 2025). Her peer-reviewed articles have also appeared in the International Journal of Hindu Studies, the Journal of Law and Religion, and Religion Compass. She is on the editorial board of DECISION, the flagship publication of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta.

Dr. Moodie regularly presents her work in public fora as well. She has served as a content consultant for the YouTube series, Crash Course: World Religions, and as a media partner for The Revealer. She has been interviewed for the Marginalia Review of Books, New Books Network, and Delhi Art Gallery. She has also delivered lectures at Harvard Divinity School, Claremont Graduate University, Seton Hall University, the University of North Florida, the University of Missouri, the Centre national de la recherché (CNRS, Paris), and the University of Bergen (Norway). She regularly organizes panels and presents her work at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, the Business History Conference, and the Annual Conference on South Asia.

Dr. Moodie’s Fulbright-Nehru project is engaging with scholars of critical management studies in India for the following purposes: to pursue research for her monograph, Business School Hinduism: An Imperial Genealogy; to enrich ongoing collaborative publications in the areas of religion and economy, religion and labor in South Asia, and cultures of management and authority; and to create partnerships between U.S. and Indian institutions, scholars, and students to advance research in postcolonial and decolonial studies in the humanities and management. Cumulatively, this work breaks new ground in excavating the possibilities that religions – and cultures, more broadly – hold for rethinking humanity’s collective economic future.

Amy Allocco

Prof. Amy Allocco is professor of religious studies and director of the Multifaith Scholars Program at Elon University which she joined in 2009. She is the 2019 recipient of the university’s Ward Family Excellence in Mentoring Award. In 2021, Elon’s College of Arts and Sciences honored her with the Excellence in Scholarship Award, while in 2012, she received the Excellence in Teaching Award. Professor Allocco teaches courses on the religions of South Asia, particularly Hinduism. She earned her PhD from Emory University, MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and BA from Colgate University.

Prof. Allocco is an anthropologist of religion who studies contemporary Hindu ritual and religious practices in Tamil Nadu. Her book project, Living with the Dead in Hindu South India, focuses on ceremonies to honor deceased relatives in which ritual drummers summon the spirit, convince it to possess a human host, and beg it to come home as a permanent family deity. Fellowships from Fulbright-Nehru and the American Institute of Indian Studies supported Professor Allocco’s research for her “domesticating the dead” project, which features in an article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Besides her co-edited volume, Ritual Innovation: Strategic Interventions in South Asian Religion (SUNY Press, 2018, with Brian K. Pennington), she co-edited a 2020 issue of the journal Fieldwork in Religion on the theme “Shifting Sites, Shifting Selves: The Intersections of Homes and Fields in the Ethnography of India” (with Jennifer D. Ortegren) and has another co-edited volume under contract with SUNY titled Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices (with Xenia Zeiler).

Prof. Allocco’s Fulbright-Nehru project is an ethnographic study analyzing the ritual, musical, and storytelling practices of three generations of Tamil Hindu drummer-priests called pampaikkārar to understand a performance tradition in transition. Through eight months of fieldwork in Tamil-speaking South India, she is exploring the creation, transmission, and refashioning of this family’s musical and ritual repertoires, and is examining what these dynamic processes reveal about shifting religious sentiments, aesthetic preferences, and socioeconomic conditions. She is also focusing on the co-constitutive nature of the drummer-priests’ ritual efficacy and musical virtuosity as well as on intergenerational learning and social media experimentation. Her resulting ethnography will delineate how changing religious, narrative, and visual tastes and relationships with technology are reshaping the contours of Tamil devotional performance culture.

Jackson Stephenson

Mr. Jackson Stephenson is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and his dissertation focuses on Esoteric Buddhist and Hindu poetry. He received his bachelor’s degree from Humboldt State University in Religious Studies, and his master’s degree in International Studies from University of Washington. Mr. Stephenson’s research focuses on the place and use of different Indian languages within Esoteric Buddhist and Hindu texts. While in India, he will be researching the “afterlife” of Esoteric Buddhist poetry in modern day bhakti communities. During this trip Mr. Stephenson plans to study Hindi intensively. He has spent extensive time in India and Nepal to study language, primarily Sanskrit, Bengali, and Tibetan, and also has facility with Prakrit and Apabhraṃśas. In the summer of 2018, he worked as Resident Director for the Critical Language Scholarship program in Kolkata, and he also regularly teaches courses at UC Santa Barbara on Buddhism and Jainism.

Mr. Stephenson has published his research on Esoteric Buddhist poetry in two peer-reviewed articles: “Love me for the Sake of the World” (2020) and “Bliss Beyond All Limit” (2021). In these articles Mr. Stephenson examined the place and use of two different genres of Apabhraṃśa verses within Esoteric Buddhist texts, showing that these verses function as both guideposts and catalysts for key experiences and junctures within Buddhist rituals. Mr. Stephenson is currently working on another article on Apabhraṃśa verses within Kashmir Śaiva texts, where these obscure verses are sung by goddesses to express ineffable and mystical teachings.

Mr. Stephenson is also interested in South Asian writing systems, inscriptions, manuscripts, and calligraphy. He wrote one of his master’s theses’ on the use of the Indic Siddhamatrika script throughout Asia, especially in Japan where it continues to be used for liturgical purposes in Shingon Buddhism. While in India Jackson also plans to take calligraphy lessons, focusing on the Siddhamatrika and Bengali scripts, in addition to ornate styles of Devanagari. Jackson also loves Indian street food.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, Mr. Stephenson is doing fieldwork for his dissertation, which explores the formal and thematic influences of medieval Buddhist poetry on modern-day bhakti communities. Mr. Stephenson is translating from key texts in Sanskrit and Apabhraṃśa while also travelling to important regions for his dissertation archive, including Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, and Bihar. Mr. Stephenson is also studying regional vernaculars and consulting manuscript collections in India, in addition to reading with pundits.

Janani Mandayam Comar

Ms. Janani Comar is a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Department of Religion. Her research is at the intersection of religion, caste, and performance. She is particularly interested in the way mythological narratives engage in ethical discourses. Her dissertation looks at hagiographies of mythic figures in colonial South India, and she traces the circulation of their narratives through print and performance. At University of Toronto, she holds the Connaught International Doctoral Scholarship and was a recipient of the MITACS Research Training Award in 2020. She has presented her research at several conferences, including the annual South Asia Conference held at University of Wisconsin Madison.

For the Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Comar aims to revisit the history of modern Hinduism to explore how religion and ethics are intimately linked to social status in the colonial period. Working with scholars at the French Institute of Pondicherry, she is focusing on the writings of subaltern Tamil-speaking communities and explore how these groups participated in lively ethical debates through performance. She is also accessing a wide range of archival sources, including from contemporary performers, to trace how narratives about virtuous figures circulated in rural and urban areas. Her findings will be an integral part of her doctoral dissertation on Tamil literature and performance.

Christopher LaMountain

Mr. Christopher LaMountain is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he pursued a double major in Religious Studies and Music Performance Studies. After being awarded an Undergraduate Research Grant from Northwestern in 2018, Mr. LaMountain completed a multi-media research project comparing gynecological texts of Mediterranean Antiquity with Marian narratives of the New Testament Apocrypha. In the latter portion of his collegiate career, Mr. LaMountain conducted research on devotional music at seven of the eight continental Baha’i Houses of Worship as the 2019 Northwestern Circumnavigator grantee. Having sung in choirs and as a classically trained tenor soloist, Mr. LaMountain also sung with the musicians of Baha’i Temples around the world and subsequently produced his honors undergraduate thesis comparing the musical styles and presentation forms of devotional music at the different Baha’i Temples. With the help of his colleagues from the Bienen School of Music, Mr. LaMountain has also presented two concert lectures on his comparative Baha’i musicological studies, which featured musical excepts from his worldwide research trip. Interested in inter-religious musicology and cross-cultural studies, Mr. LaMountain has achieved proficiency in French, Italian, and Hindi, passed upper-level courses on various traditions of the major world religions, and studied musical traditions, such as Negro Spiritual, Western Classical, Hindustani, Ugandan traditional, and Nueva Cancion Chilena musical styles. Mr. LaMountain aspires to pursue a graduate degree in sacred music studies, become a religious studies and musicology professor, and continue singing in choirs over the course of his life.

With his Fulbright-Nehru project, Mr. LaMountain is both observing and participating in the process of devotional music making at the prayer services of the Asian Baha’i House of Worship, called the Lotus Temple. In comparing both these observed musical styles and presentational forms of the Lotus Temple with other faith spaces in Delhi, for example Akshardham and ISKCON Temples, Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, Myanmar Buddha Temple, and Moti Masjid, Mr. LaMountain is determining the manner in which local worship music from religious traditions outside of the Baha’i Faith influences intonation of the Lotus Temple.

Rhône Grajcar

Mr. Rhône Grajcar graduated from Whitman College in 2021 with a Bachelor of Arts in History and South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies. At Whitman he explored South Asian religions and US foreign policy, culminating in eight months spent in India on a David L. Boren Scholarship. He has followed his interests to internships at the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the South Asia Practice at the Albright Stonebridge Group. He is eager to deepen his understanding of South Asia religions and contribute to the study of shrines during his Fulbright-Nehru grant.

Mr. Grajcar’s Fulbright-Nehru project involves ethnographic field work at Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki Dargah in New Delhi and Dargah Yousoufain in Hyderabad, within the dargahs’ compounds. By engaging the dargah attendees in conversation, the project seeks to understand how COVID-19 and its impacts on daily life have affected the sense of community dargahs are renowned for. These shared spaces rely on crowded gatherings and communal food during langar to build their inclusive potentialities, which will present challenges in a post-COVID world. Situating the project in the understanding of dargahs as discursive, rather than fixed spaces, Mr. Grajcar hopes to help capture how these resilient institutions and their exploratory authority weather the disruptions of the pandemic.

Christian Novetzke

Prof. Christian Novetzke received a BA from Macalester College, an MTS from Harvard University, and a PhD from Columbia University. Prof. Novetzke is Professor of South Asia Studies, Religious Studies, and Global Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is also Professor of the Comparative History of Ideas at UW. Prof. Novetzke’s books include The Quotidian Revolution (Columbia University Press 2016) and Religion and Public Memory (Columbia University Press 2008). He is also the co-author (with Andy Rotman and William Elison) of Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Harvard University Press 2016) and co-editor (with Jack Hawley and Swapna Sharma) Of Bhakti and Power (University of Washington Press 2019). Among his awards, Prof. Novetzke was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018 and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow in 2013. His current projects include a book on yoga as political theory and practice with co-author Sunila S. Kale (under contract at Columbia University Press) and a book on the thought of Savitribai Phule, for which he was awarded the current Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.

Savitribai Phule was born into an impoverished subaltern caste of Shudra agricultural workers in India in 1831. She became one of the first Shudra women in India to receive an education. She authored two books of political poetry in Marathi, each articulating her powerful vision for social justice and her fight against caste patriarchy. Her ideas about religion, caste, gender, and power made her one of the most important critical thinkers in Indian history. However, Savitribai Phule is hardly known outside of India. With Fulbright-Nehru’s support Prof. Novetzke hopes to complete his research on a book on the critical thought of Savitribai Phule.