I am an Assistant Professor of Religion in the Religion Department at Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT, USA. I received my Ph.D. in West and South Asian Religions from Emory University (2016), my Master's of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School (2005) and a Bachelor's of Arts in Religion from Nebraska Wesleyan University (2003). I first traveled to India in 2005 to volunteer in the Women and Children's Development Unit of Seva Mandir (https://www.sevamandir.org/), an NGO in Udaipur, Rajasthan committed to rural development. I returned to study Sanskrit in the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) program in Pune, to study Hindi in the AIIS Jaipur program, and to conduct fieldwork in Udaipur.