Assistant Professor of religious studies
PH.D., University of Pennsylvania; M.A., B.A., McGill University
Aditya Bhattacharjee is a scholar of South and Southeast Asian religions whose research explores interactions between Hindu and Buddhist traditions across diverse cultural settings, with particular emphasis on Indian, Thai, and North American contexts. His scholarship brings together a range of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of religion and addresses the question of how people participate in multiple religious traditions even when they perceive those traditions to stand in tension with one another.
Bhattacharjee' research projects are grounded in longstanding ethnographic engagement with field sites that include temples in Mumbai, beauty salons in Bangkok, Thai restaurants in Watkins Glen, and yoga studios in New York City. Together, these encounters form the empirical backbone of his first book project, Global Ganesh: Mapping a Divine Diaspora. The book studies the contemporary reception of deities from the Hindu pantheon—most notably Ganesha, the elephant-headed remover of obstacles, alongside Shiva, Vishnu, and various manifestations of the Hindu Mother Goddess, including Lakshmi and Kali—among religious communities whose devotional lives exceed conventional distinctions between Hindu and Buddhist practice. Raised between Bombay, Bangkok, and Montreal, Bhattacharjee's scholarly interests have been shaped in part by his experience as a Third Culture Kid (TCK). Growing up across multiple cultural and linguistic worlds sparked an enduring fascination with the ways people create belonging as they move through the world. It was a desire to better understand these processes that first led him to the School of Religious Studies at McGill University in Canada, where he earned BA and MA degrees in Religious Studies. He then moved to the United States in 2017 to complete his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Sewanee, he taught at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities, with a joint appointment in the Department of Asian Studies.
In the classroom, Bhattacharjee invites students to approach the study of religion in ways that foreground storytelling, visual culture, and the overlaps between doctrine and everyday life. Above all, he encourages them to question received ways of knowing, become more curious about the people and places around them, and relish the sense of wonder that emerges when they engage anew with familiar surroundings. Grateful for the many students he has had the privilege of mentoring at previous institutions, he looks forward to extending that spirit of mentorship and collaborative learning on the Domain while getting to know the Sewanee community, sharing meals with colleagues and friends, and sharing his lifelong love of South Asia's myriad performing arts traditions.
