Shruti Patel

I am a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Washington. Specializing in modern South Asia, my interests encompass religious and social developments, knowledge practices, historiography, colonialism, princely states, and literary and physical cultures. My dissertation, The Play of History: The Swaminarayan Religious Community in Modern India, addresses the intellectual and cultural determinants of modern Hindu religious formations through the development of the Swaminarayan community from pre-colonial to post-colonial Gujarat. The study is based on visual, material, spatial and textual records of the Swaminarayan tradition and the region 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.

I am currently completing my dissertation. Prior, my undergraduate studies were at New York University, followed by a master's degree in South Asian religion at Columbia University.