Swayam Bagaria named Hindu Studies professor at Harvard Divinity

Indian American scholar Swayam Bagaria has been named Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies at Harvard Divinity School..

Bagaria was most recently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Hindu Studies at HDS and was named to that position in 2022. Prior to his time at HDS, Bagaria was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia in the College Fellows Program. He received his PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2020.

“I am thrilled to welcome Swayam Bagaria to the HDS faculty,” said HDS Dean Marla F. Frederick. “Professor Bagaria is not only an emerging scholar, but also a proven and appreciated teacher.

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“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. His appointment pushes forward our effort to continue to develop Hindu Studies and a Hindu Ministry Program at the Divinity School.”

An anthropologist interested in the psychosocial aspect of religion, particularly Hinduism, Bagaria’s 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, according to a media release.

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“I am excited 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,” said Bagaria.

“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.”

In his first book, Bagaria provides a new framework to understand the bespoke internal plurality of Hinduism and its capacity to allow a diverse set of regional sects with their own set of beliefs and practices and with differing states of cultural and social organization to subsist.

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Bagaria’s second book is on the relation between spirituality and mental health in India in the last century.

He has also written on the impact that an acknowledgement of the salience of religious identity and belief in India has had on the design of constitutional orders, the framing of foreign policy, and on understanding the economics of dead assets.

Other interests include using computational social science to study belief formation, comparative constitutional law, contemporary psychedelic sciences, and the cultural economics of religion.

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At Harvard Divinity School, he teaches a year long course on history of psychotherapy and psychiatry in India and its engagement with the spiritual and cultural aspects of religious belief, as well as elective courses on comparative constitutional law, the ethics and economics of caste, and an introductory class on social science research methods.

“Swayam Bagaria is already a much-appreciated member of our faculty, bringing to campus fresh expertise regarding Hindu temples, Hindu and civil law codes, methods in ethnographic study, and insights into the varieties of living Hinduism,” said Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology and search committee chair for the tenure-track position in Hindu Studies.

“As HDS expands Hindu studies and strengthens the place of Hindu perspectives in ministry studies, Swayam will be an essential person, much appreciated in both the academic and ministerial dimensions of HDS.”