Harini Kumar (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is a sociocultural anthropologist with research interests in lived religion, Islam and Muslim societies, kinship, gender, ethics, material culture, and migration. At the ISM, she will complete her first book manuscript, Formations of Tamil Islam: Belonging, Place, and Historical Consciousness in South India, which is an ethnography of Muslim religiosity and lived experience in Tamil-speaking South India. It argues against the totalizing logics of Hindu nationalism to focus instead on alternative modes of constructing self and community that do not reduce Muslim lifeworlds to just a minoritized identity. Kumar’s new project on transoceanic Muslim mobilities explores the connections between South India, Southeast Asia, and the Americas through the enduring legacy of a Sufi saint. It traces present-day continuities with older racialized networks of trade, indentureship, and migration, providing new perspectives on religious belonging that emerges from an interconnected ocean space.
Prior to joining Yale, Kumar held a two-year postdoctoral position at Princeton University. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and by several programs at the University of Chicago and Princeton University. She has also been involved in several collaborations. She was the co-curator of the two-year Power, Inequality, Dissent(link is external) project at Princeton University, and a co-PI in a multi-year, global research project titled Logistics in the Making of Mobile Worlds(link is external) funded by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.
In Fall 2024, Kumar is teaching an undergraduate seminar titled ‘Religion, Place, and Space,’ crosslisted in the Department of Anthropology, Religious Studies, and the South Asian Studies Council.