Conference and Workshop Papers
Symposium co-organizer and contributor with Emilia Bachrach and Ridhima Sharma “Religion, Labor, and Capital: Religious Worlds of Work”
Annual Conference on South Asia
October 2026
Invited Guest Speaker “Religious Law: Ethnographic Approaches”
Emory University NEH Summer Institute “Law and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Toolkit for Humanities Scholars”
July 2026
Panel organizer and contributor “Unexpected Histories of Commercial Education: Origins and Diffusion in an Age of Imperialism”
Business History Conference in London, England
March 2026
Roundtable co-organizer (with Ridhima Sharma) and respondent “Anthropology of Hinduism: Troubling Institutional Locations, Disciplinary Training, and Political Investments”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion
November 2025
Invited Guest Speaker “On Preparing Students for the World That Is, and Imagining the World As It Could Be”
Inaugural Annual Business Humanities Conference
October 2025
Workshop co-organizer (with Isaac Weiner), “Religion, Business, and the Workplace”
The Ohio State University
May 2025
Invited Presentation “Three Provocations on Religion and Business”
Claremont Graduate University
April 2025
Conference paper “Producing Religions: A Trans-Imperial History of Business School Hinduism”
Business History Conference
March 2025
Roundtable co-organizer (with Joy Palacios) and Contributor “Management Gurus: From American Evangelicals to Indian Business Professionals”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego
November 2024
Roundtable Organizer and Contributor “Pedagogies of Racial Capitalism”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego
November 2024
Invited Public Presentation, “Religion, Empire, and Business Schools”
University of North Florida
November 2024
Respondent “Author Meets Critics Roundtable on Barton Scott’s Slandering the Sacred”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Antonio
November 2023
Panel respondent and presider “Systems, Circulations, and Management of Devotion and Dissent”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Antonio
November 2023
“Authenticating Leadership”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Denver
November 2022
Symposium co-organizer (with Cassie Adcock) and respondent: “Hindu Economicus”
Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin
October 2022
“The Science of Self-Management”
Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin
October 2022
Roundtable co-organizer (with Jolyon Thomas): “Management Pedagogies, Subject Formation, and the Corporate Form”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (Virtual)
November 2021
“Circulating B-School Religion: (Post-)Colonial Feedback Loops and the Limits of Critique”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (Virtual)
November 2021
“Managing the Gods: How Temples Became Public Institutions”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (Virtual)
November 2021
Roundtable Contribution: “Institutional Matters: Controversies at the Center of Religion, Law, and Politics”
Society for the Anthropology of Religion (Virtual)
May 2021
“New Books in Hindu Studies”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (Virtual)
November 2020
Panel co-organizer (with Brian Pennington) and presider “Economies of Modern Hinduism: Markets of Discipline and Critique”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego
November 2019
Panel co-organizer (with J. Barton Scott) “Corporate Gods and Sacred Development: Toward a Genealogy of Market Religion”
Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin
October 2019
“India’s IIMs and the Institutionalization of a Hindu Model of Management”
Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin
October 2019
“Dis/Connect: Fieldwork in a Technological Age”
Symposium on Changing Ethnographic Practices in South Asia at the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin
October 2019
“Kālī and the Queen: Religion and the Production of Calcutta’s Pasts and Presents”
Spaces of Religion in Urban South Asia: An International Workshop hosted by the University of Bergen, Norway
September 2018
“B-School Religion: How Hindu Theologies Shape India’s Neoliberal Cityscapes”
Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in Washington, D.C.
March 2018
Panel co-organizer (with Kirsten Wesselhoeft) “Moral Mobility: Class, Labor, and Religious Ethics”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Antonio
November 2016
“Hindu Spirituality for the Moral and Mobile”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Antonio
November 2016
Panel organizer “Sacred Sites in Urban India”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Atlanta
November 2015
“Kolkata, City of Temples?”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Atlanta
November 2015
“Managing God’s Money: Brahmins, Civil Society, and the ‘Public’ in Twentieth- Century Bengal”
Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin
October 2015
“Blood, Power, and Public Interest at a Hindu Temple in Kolkata”
Animal Sacrifice on Trial: Cases from South Asia, hosted by the Centre national de la recherché scientifique [CNRS] in Paris, France
June 2015
“Religion and the Project of Indian Modernity: Cleaning up Kālīghāṭ Temple”
Religion in South Asia Conference hosted by Missouri State University
March 2015
“Cleaning up Kālīghāṭ: Class Contestations of the Temple Space”
Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego
November 2014
“Tracking Wealth and Patronage at Kālīghāṭ Temple”
Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin
October 2014
“Doting Wives and Ferocious Mothers: The Divine Feminine and Her Power in Hinduism”
Educators for Teaching India Conference at Harvard University
April 2014
“Kālīghāṭ Temple: Discursive Productions of an Ambivalent Antiquity”
Hindu Studies Colloquium, Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School
October 2013
“A City Contested: British and Bengali Versions of Calcutta’s History”
International Students’ Conference, Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi
April 2012
“God’s Representatives on Trial: The Case of Kālīghāṭ”
Fulbright-Nehru Conference, Kochi
March 2012
“Contesting the Temple: Kālīghāṭ in Contemporary Bengali Conceptual Worlds”
Harvard South Asia Workshop
March 2011
Invited Lectures
“On Preparing Students for the World That Is, and Imagining the World as It Could Be”
Seton Hall University
October 2025
“Three Provocations on Religion and Business”
Claremont Graduate University
April 2025
“Religion, Empire, and Business Schools”
University of North Florida
November 2024
“Kali, Kolkata, and Colonial Rule”
Harvard Divinity School Course, “The Divine Feminine in Hindu Worlds”
March 2023
“Modi and the Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India”
Global Engagement Speaker Series, College of International Studies at the University of Oklahoma
February 2020
“Indian Models of Corporate Leadership”
Indian Institute of Management Studies in Kolkata, India
June 2019
“Indian Nationalism Secular and Hindu: Wrestling with Gandhi’s Legacy”
The Center for the Study of Nationalism at the University of Oklahoma
October 2018
“Fighting for Respect, Struggling for Life: Negotiating the Urban in India”
The Gender and Justice Speakers Series hosted by the Women’s and Gender Studies Center for Social Justice at the University of Oklahoma
October 2017
“Modernizing a Hindu Temple: Kālīghāṭ in Colonial and Contemporary Calcutta”
The Rufus Monroe & Sofie Hoegaard Paine Lecture Series at the University of Missouri
October 2016
“Corporate Governance of a Religious Institution”
Iconic Faculty Series at Globsyn Business School, Kolkata
March 2012
“A Temple and its City: Kālīghāṭ’s Place in Conceptualizations of Calcutta”
Society for Preservation, Kolkata
February 2012