Neena Mahadev

Neena Mahadev, a cultural anthropologist, specializes in the anthropology of religion (Buddhism and Christianity), pluralism, politics, ethno-religious nationalism and populism; the study of evangelism, proselytism; religion and the political economy; media and mediation, and South Asian Studies. She is the author of Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2023), for which she was awarded the Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion in 2024. The focus of her ethnographic work is the contemporary and historical dynamics of inter-religion and competing Buddhist and Christian sovereignties, in the context of wartime and postwar Sri Lanka. Her inter-disciplinary research draws from and contributes to the fields of Anthropology, Religious Studies, and Political Theory.