Tulasi Srinivas

Home institution

Emerson College

Research project

The Runaway Goddess: Water, Gender and Caste in a Climate Apocalypse

Highlighting the paradox between Hinduism’s view of water as female, sacred and sentient, and the endemic pollution of water resources and climate-driven drought in contemporary India, this ethnographic and archival project considers the significance of gender, caste and religion in emerging climate justice initiatives to interrogate the existential ethics at stake.

Profile

Tulasi Srinivas is a Professor of Anthropology, Religion and Transnational Studies at The Marlboro Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College and is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Indian Sociological Society. Her research interests include Anthropology of religion, anthropology of globalization, food and gender, secularism and violence, transnational processes, economy, money and indigeneity, ritual studies, anthropology of wonder, ecology, life and flourishing, food and drink, materiality, visual culture, post colonialism.

In addition to many articles, Srinivas has published six books including, most recently, The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder (Duke University Press), and Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism (Columbia University Press). She has held several prestigious fellowships at Harvard University, Georgetown University, Kate Hamburger Kolleg, Bochum, Germany, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Course

HDS 3181: Goddesses and Ghosts: The Divine Feminine in Hindu Worlds (spring 2023)