Dr. Ajay Verghese is an associate professor of political science at Middlebury College, Vermont. He received his PhD in 2013 from George Washington University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. His research interests include Indian politics, ethnic violence, historical legacies, religion, and methodology. His first book, The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016, and his articles have been published in Modern Asian Studies, Terrorism and Political Violence, Journal of Development Studies, Politics & Society, Politics and Religion, Sociological Theory, and Journal of Historical Political Economy. He is a winner of the Ted Jelen Award and has been honorably mentioned in the IPSA Award for Concept Analysis in Political Science.
Dr. Verghese’s Fulbright-Nehru project entails two studies of political Hinduism over the course of six months in India. The first study is based in Udaipur, where he is developing a novel theory explaining the rise in the popularity of spiritual teachers (often called “gurus”, “yogis”, or “godmen”) who are explicitly associated with political parties and organizations. The second study is examining a potential backlash to the increasing politicization of religion via the growth of “secular Hinduism” among upper middle-class Hindus in Delhi.