Sondra Hausner

Biography:

Sondra Hausner (Princeton AB 1991; Cornell PhD 2002) is a sociocultural anthropologist specialising in South Asian religion and culture. She is the author of Wandering with Sadhus: Ascetics in the Hindu Himalayas (2007) and The Spirits of Crossbones Graveyard: Time, Ritual, and Sexual Commerce in London (2016), and the editor of Durkheim in Dialogue: A Centenary Celebration of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (2013), among other volumes. She has been a visiting professor in anthropology at the University of Tuebingen (2015) and Goethe University Frankfurt (2019). From 2018 until 2021, she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to examine the history of Hindu nationalism in India since independence.

Research Interests:

Social and cultural theories of religion; religions and representations of South Asia and the Himalayas; migrant and diaspora religion; gender and identity; ritual experience and practice; Hinduism; the history of nationalism.