Professor 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.

General Interests:

Ethnographic methods; comparative methods; public policy.

Research Centres & Projects: 

Director, British Centre for Durkheimian Studies

Editorships: 

Religion and Society: Advances in Research

European Bulletin of Himalayan Research

Links:

https://www.spc.ox.ac.uk/people/academic/prof-sondra-hausner

https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/major-research-fellowships/renouncing-world-hindu-politics-and-ascetic-life-independent-india

 

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