Emilia Bachrach

Biography

Emilia Bachrach’s ethnographic research has focused on how interpretations of religious texts inform and are informed by intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and by changing class, regional, and gender identities in contemporary western India. Her monograph on this subject, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism, was published in 2022 as part of the American Academy of Religion’s “Religion in Translation Series” with Oxford University Press.

Bachrach’s developing research includes two long-term book projects, one based on ethnographic work in Barcelona, Spain, and the other on field research in Ahmedabad, India. The Spain-based project focuses on how South Asian Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh women and their broader communities in Barcelona innovate sites not officially (by the state, etc.) recognized as “religious” (e.g., dance studios and retail shops) as primary centers for religious gathering and identity-building. The India-based project considers Hindu women’s cultivation of piety through ascetic practices in the city of Ahmedabad. Bachrach is also working on two articles about how Hindu masculinities are negotiated and debated through social media and is co-authoring a sourcebook (under contract with NYU Press) on women in Hindu traditions with Sohini Sarah Pillai and Jennifer D. Ortegren.

Her writing has appeared in Fieldwork in Religion, the Journal of Hindu Studies, and the Journal of Vaishnava Studies, among others. Her 2019 book, In the Service of Krishna: Illustrating the Lives of Eighty-Four Vaishnavas from a 1702 Manuscript in the Amit Ambalal Collection (published with Mapin), was featured in a discussion presented by the New Books Network.