Srinivas Awarded Fellowship for Study in India

Associate Professor Tulasi Srinivas was awarded a senior short-term fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) to help her research her forthcoming book, The Absent Goddess: Religion, Ecology and Violence in Urban India.

“The American Institute of Indian Studies is one of the foremost centers of the study of India in the U.S., and I applied for their senior fellowship as a complete moonshot,” Srinivas said.

Srinivas, who teaches anthropology in the Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, said she is grateful to the AIIS for the fellowship, which will allow her to travel to India to conduct ethnographic field work, “but more importantly, I am grateful for my colleagues at the Institute and Dean Amy Ansell, who have given me the support and the confidence to try for anything!”

Earlier in the year, Srinivas was awarded a prestigious fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to work on the same book.

The Absent Goddess will examine the effects of unchecked industrial development and political corruption on religious and cultural life in Srinivas’ hometown of Bangalore, sometimes called “the Silicon Valley of Asia.”

In 2016, Srinivas was awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship to complete her most recent book, The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder (Duke U, 2018).