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Harvard University appoints Swayam Bagaria as Hindu Studies professor
The appointment is in line with the school’s aim to develop Hindu Studies and a Hindu Ministry Program
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Danielle Daphne Ang / Image credit – hds.harvard.edu/
Harvard University has appointed anthropologist Swayam Bagaria as an assistant professor of Hindu Studies at the Harvard Divinity School (HDS).
Bagaria was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the school and was selected for the position in 2022. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia in the College Fellows Program.
HDS dean Marla F. Frederick welcomed Swayam Bagaria to the faculty, stating, “Professor Bagaria is not only an emerging scholar, but also a proven and appreciated teacher. His ethnographic perspective on lived religion today and his research on the relationship between classical Hinduism and popular Hinduism in contemporary India will allow Hindu Studies to better flourish at HDS and Harvard.”
Bagaria expressed excitement to join HDS “at what seems like an inflection point in the history of the School.” “Religion, even if just as a cluster of biases or as a set of ethical constraints, has always been important for most of our endeavors in the world but it was rarely acknowledged as such,” he said in a statement.
“My strength has always been my curiosity and receptivity to different disciplinary frameworks and methods. I find that reframing a problem from multiple perspectives and understanding the tradeoffs between them can break the rut of being trapped in scholarly echo chambers. Practically, I try and achieve this in my research collaborations but even more so in my teaching,” he added.
As an anthropologist, Bagaria’s interests lie in the psychological aspects of religion, particularly Hinduism. His work combines computational, cognitive, and socio-cultural methods to understand the formation and persistence of religious and religion-like beliefs and commitments in contemporary India.
Since 2014, he has worked on the changing relationship between popular Hinduism and political populism in India through an ethnographic and textual examination of the regnant deification of the past customary practice of widow burning.
His other interests include semiotic paradigms in Sanskrit aesthetics and ritual philosophical anthropology and disparate genealogies of social theory. Aside from that, Bagaria is devising a quantitative and qualitatively inspired side project on the relation between cultural reflexes and the 'experience economy' in big data and machine language environments.
Courses taught by Swayam Bagaria at HDS, include Inter-religious Dynamics of South Asia; Mind, Spirituality, and Mental Health in Hinduism; Qualitative and Mixed Methods; and Hinduism and Comparative Law.
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