Professor David Gellner
MA, DPhil, FBA
Emeritus Fellow since 2024
My research in Nepal (since 1981) has encompassed religion and ritual, social organization, ethnicity, history, activism, democratization, borderlands diaspora, and migration. Current research focuses on caste, class, and culture, including the position of Dalits (ex-Untouchables). Other research projects in which I have been involved are listed below.
- Professor of Social Anthropology and University Academic Fellow, All Souls College (from 2008 to 2024)
- Lecturer in the Social Anthropology of South Asia, University of Oxford and Fellow of Wolfson College (from 2002 to 2008)
- Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Reader in Social Anthropology, Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University (from 1994 to 2002)
- Junior Research Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford (from 1986 to 1990)
- MPhil, Balliol, and DPhil, Wolfson College, Oxford (from 1979 to 1986)
- PPE, Balliol College, Oxford (from 1976 to 1979)
- The anthropology of South and East Asia
- Religion, ritual, healing traditions
- Politics, ethnicity, activism, democracy
- Borders and borderlands
- Caste, class, mobility
- Re-Creating Anthropology: Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination (ed. with D.P. Martinez) (ASA conference volume). London: Routledge,2022
- Politics in Gorakhpur since the 1920s: The Making of a Safe "Hindu" Seat (with S. Chaturvedi & S.K. Pandey) Contemporary South Asia 27(1), 2019
- Global Nepalis: Religion, Culture, and Community in a New and Old Diaspora (ed. with S. Hausner) (Delhi: OUP, 2018)
- Religion, Secularism, and Ethnicity in Contemporary Nepal (ed. with S. Hausner & C. Letizia), (Delhi: OUP, 2016)
- 'Schools as Organizations: On the Question of Value Consensus’ Anthropology of This Century 12, (2015)
- Rebuilding Buddhism: The Theravada Movement in Twentieth-Century Nepal (with Sarah LeVine) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
- Publications (External Link)
- The anthropology of South Asia
- Social anthropology
- The anthropology of religion
- ‘The Dalit Search for Dignity: State, Society, and Mobilization from Below in Nepal’ (2019-2023), British Academy [HDV190020]
- ‘Caste, Class, and Culture: Changing Bahun and Dalit Identities in Nepal’ (2013-2017), ESRC [ES/L00240X/1]
- ‘Vernacular Religion: Varieties of Religiosity in the Nepali Diaspora’ (2009-2013), AHRC [AH/HO15876/1]
- ‘The (Micro)Politics of Democratisation: European-South Asian Exchanges on Governance, Conflict and Civic Action’ (2004-2007), EU-Asialink [NP/ASIA-LINK/001 (84-062)]
- 'The Impact of Activism in Nepal' (2002-2005), British Academy