Shruti Patel

I am Assistant Professor in History at Salisbury University. I work on the social and cultural history of South Asia, focusing on religious and social movements, princely states, the relationship between textual and physical culture, and knowledge formation during the early modern, colonial and post-colonial periods, particularly in Gujarat with relation to broader Indian Ocean networks. My book project, The Play of History: The Svaminarayan Religious Community in Modern India, addresses the intellectual and cultural determinants of modern Hindu religious formation through the case of the Svaminarayan community based on visual, material, spatial and textual records over two centuries. This work has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships. 

Prior, my undergraduate studies were at New York University, followed by a master’s degree in South Asian religion at Columbia University.
Supervisors: Anand Yang, Purnima Dhavan, and Christian Lee Novetzke
Address: Salisbury, MD