Tulasi Srinivas

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Tulasi Srinivas, an associate professor of anthropology at Emerson College, studies global and transnational cultural anthropology, with a special focus on the political economy and religion in urban India. Her research addresses the complexities of religious creativity in post-liberalism India. She is the author of Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism through the Sathya Sai Movement (Columbia University Press, 2010) and editor of the award-winning Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia (University of California Press, 2012).

While a fellow, Srinivas is completing her next book project: a focused ethnography of wonder and creativity in India. Based on a 15-year study of ritual creativity in Hindu temples in the global city of Bangalore, the work seeks a new way of understanding everyday modern, sacred life through the metrics of technology, money, emotion, space, and time. It affords an inventive rereading of the classical anthropological topic of ritual to reorient us to the ubiquity of ingenuity. It seeks to unpack the analytic of wonder—where it lies, what it is, and what it does—to sensitize us to “wonder making” as a way to live everyday creative and ethical lives.

Srinivas, who earned her PhD in anthropology from Boston University, has been a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.