1. I am PI on an ERC Consolidator Grant, 'Religion and Its Others in South Asia and the World' (2019-2025), which examines the forms in which individuals and communities raise, in the open or in more hidden transcripts, questions over the dominant religious norms in South Asia. While this project is ethnographically grounded in South Asia, it also extends beyond this region to examine global implications of critical debates and actions that are taking place there. Its first major publications are the edited volumes Global Sceptical Publics: From Nonreligious Print Media to ‘Digital Atheism’and An Anthropology of Non-religion?The team members are Amelie Blom, Ben Laws, Johannes Quack andMascha Schulz.
2. ‘Names and (Dis)identity: A New Approach to Indian Secularism’. Funded first by an Independent Social Research Foundation Early Career Fellowship (2013-2014) and subsequently by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2017-2018), this project takes up social and political questions of naming that are often overlooked in studies of inequality or exclusion. What if Indian personal names ceased to automatically categorise their bearers according to their caste and/or religion so that identities are deliberately blurred? An essay on Sikh naming practices is available here, and a special issue on names in South Asia was published in SAMAJ.
3. ‘Gurus, Anti-gurus, and Media in North India’. Funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (2019-2022), this interdisciplinary collaboration with Arkotong Longkumer, Koonal Duggal and Neelabh Gupta builds on my previous ethnographic studies of the modern Indian spiritual guru and the anti-superstition movement, applying methods from religious and media studies to understand how visual media has become a site of intense interaction between gurus and the anti-superstition movement. An edited book on gurus and media was published in 2023 alongside numerous articles and book chapters.