Harini Kumar (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is a sociocultural anthropologist with research interests in lived religion, Islam and Muslim societies, kinship, gender, ethics, material culture, and migration. She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. She is completing her first book manuscript, Formations of Tamil Islam: Religion, Mobility, and Placemaking in Asia, which is an ethnographic study of Muslim belonging in Tamil-speaking south India. Kumar’s new research project on transoceanic Muslim mobilities explores the connections between South India, Southeast Asia, and the Americas through the enduring legacy of a Sufi saint. It traces present-day continuities with older, racialized networks of trade, indentureship, and migration, providing new perspectives on religious belonging that emerges from an interconnected ocean space.
Prior to joining Yale, Kumar held a two-year postdoctoral position at Princeton University. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and by several programs at the University of Chicago and Princeton University. She was recently the co-curator of the two-year Power, Inequality, Dissent project at Princeton University, and co-PI in a multi-year, global research project titled Logistics in the Making of Mobile Worlds funded by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.
Kumar teaches courses on religious placemaking, global cultures of dissent, material and visual culture, gender, and migration.