The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil

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.

Over the past several years, Mahadev’s research interests have also led her toward carrying out fieldwork and archival study in Southeast Asia, in addition to her established focus on South Asia. She is especially interested in transregional studies of Asia, with focus on (South, Southeast, and East) Asian religious movements, from the 'Cold' War era to present day. 

Mahadev’s research has been generously supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Johns Hopkins University, the Max Planck Institute, the Yap Kim Hao Memorial Fund, Yale-NUS College, and the J. William Fulbright Foundation.

Before joining Duke, Mahadev was an Assistant Professor in Yale-NUS College’s Department of Anthropology, where she taught anthropology of religion courses, as well as Introduction to Anthropology, Anthropology of Violence, and Modern Social Thought.

As a member of the Religious Studies Department at Duke, she’ll teach courses including Ethnographies of Religion, Religion and Media, Christianities in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Religion and Politics in Asia, and Religions of South and Southeast Asia.