Sasha Sabherwal is an interdisciplinary scholar of Asian American studies with research interests in the South Asian diaspora, anthropology of religion, and transnational feminist cultural critique. She received her PhD from Yale University in the Department of American Studies with a certificate in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research examines caste and gender hierarchies in the Sikh diaspora of the Pacific Northwest. Her book manuscript, Circuits of Faith: Transnational Religion, Caste, and Gender in the Sikh Diaspora of the Pacific Northwest, is an ethnographic exploration of how caste is (re)produced within the South Asian diaspora, and how it becomes a heterogeneous and incoherent category. She shows that while many presuppose a settled and stable idea of what caste is, the lived reality for diasporic Punjabi Sikhs is messy, contradictory, and in flux. The project demonstrates that as caste travels, it is remade, changing across different diasporic spaces. Her scholarly work has been published in Sikh Formations, Anthropological Quarterly, Sikh Research Journal, and Social Text (forthcoming). Prior to joining Tufts, she was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.
In the coming year, Sasha is looking forward to interdisciplinary collaboration with fellows and affiliates in the Center for Humanities at Tufts. She is particularly excited to share interest across the study of religion, colonialism, and empire and is eager to participate in programming related to those themes.