Deonnie Moodie
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Religious Studies
University of Oklahoma
Former Media Partner, The Revealer (2020-2021)
Education
PhD Religious Studies, Harvard University
MDiv South Asian Religions, Harvard Divinity School
BA International Studies, Hope College
Biography
I am an ethnographer and historian of religion specializing in South Asia and its global connections. I am especially interested in how religious ideas and practices entwine with political and economic discourse, re-shaping one another in distinctive ways in the modern world.
My first book published by Oxford University Press The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City (2018) focuses on Kālīghāṭ, a Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess Kālī in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India. From the late-nineteenth century to the present, among foreigners and locals, in the vernacular Bengali language and in English, this site has been envisioned as a site of great spiritual power, an ancient relic, a hotbed of priestly corruption, and a physically unclean space site in need of major cleansing and renovation. Employing historical, legal, and ethnographic sources, I examine the ways middle-class authors, judges, and activists have worked to modernize Kālīghāṭ over the past long century. Rather than being rejected or becoming obsolete with the arrival of British colonialism and its accompanying iconoclastic Protestant ideals, the temple became a medium through which middle-class Hindus could produce and publicize their modernity, as well as the modernity of their city and nation. That trend has continued and even strengthened in the wake of India’s economic liberalization in the 1990s. I further explore lower-class groups’ resistance to middle-class modernizing efforts. Conflict between class groups throws into high relief the various roles the temple plays in peoples’ lives, and explains why the modernizers have struggled to bring their plans to fruition. This work was recently featured on New Books Network and Marginalia, an L. A. Review of Books podcast . It was also featured on the official blog of the Campaign for the American Reader. I wrote here about applying the “Page 99” test to the book.
In my current book project, I examine conceptions of authenticity, mindfulness, and spirituality currently emerging in the context of management education in India and the United States. Rather than pointing to Hindu or Christian nationalism, or to a recent neoliberal capture of religion to understand this phenomenon, I provide a transimperial history of business school education in order to demonstrate that these institutions have always been engaged in the moral and moralizing project of creating productive subjects. I demonstrate the ways that this project has remained consistent, even as it has been articulated alternately along either national, religious, and racial lines or as scientific and therefore universal.
The late Anne Monius was my advisor, mentor, and friend for the ten years I was at Harvard and beyond. I owe her a great debt. You can read my tribute to her here.
(Disclaimer: The opinions or statements expressed herein should not be taken as a position of or endorsement by the University of Oklahoma.)