Professor Sondra Hausner

Sondra Hausner is Professor of Anthropology of Religion, the first holder of the title at Oxford.  At St. Peter's (and for other colleges of the University), she teaches social theory, particularly as embedded in the study of religion since the late 19th century.  Her own specialization is in South Asia and the Himalayas, where she grew up, and where she has been a practicing ethnographer for almost thirty years. 

Theoretically, Sondra specialises in Durkheimian sociology, Geertzian anthropology, and the relations between individuals and their collectives. She is the prize-winning author of two ethnographies about the generation of cultural identity — one on asceticism in India and Nepal, and one on counter-cultural life in London — and the editor or co-editor of eight volumes on Durkheimian thought; religion in diaspora; and women's renunciation in South Asia.  Her most recent book is a theoretical reflection on method in anthropology, A Genealogy of Method: Anthropology's Ancestors and the Meaning of Culture (2024).

Sondra's current research is on the history of Hindu nationalism in India from an ethnographic perspective.  Her work looks at the changing meaning of the categories of Hinduism and the nation over time, and the internal logic of nationalist thought.  The project was funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust and will be published by Princeton University Press.  In addition to her research, Sondra is the director of the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies and the co-editor of the journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research.  

Before returning to academia, Sondra worked in policy organizations in Kathmandu, Nepal; an art museum in New York City; and the United Nations (in both Kathmandu and New York).  She is delighted to guide St. Peter’s students from all backgrounds as they progress in their studies; she also supervises master’s and doctoral students, and mentors post-doctoral fellows, in a wide range of topics relating to social relations in South Asia.