People

2009-10 Research Associates and Visiting Faculty

Lucinda Ramberg

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and South Asian Religion

Lucinda Ramberg is an assistant professor in the Gender and Women's Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky, where she teaches courses on feminist and queer theory, kinship, the body, religion, medical anthropology, and the anthropology of India.

Her research projects in South Asia and the United States have roots in longstanding engagements with sexuality, gender, religion, and the nature of power. These projects have focused in particular on the body as an artifact of culture and power in relation to questions of sexual subjectivity and citizenship. She has conducted research on transsexual medicine in the US, 'sacred prostitution' (devadasi dedication) and Dalit conversion in South India, and purity campaigns transnationally. Her approach is interdisciplinary and draws on feminist, postcolonial and queer theories, South Asia studies, and the anthropology of the body, religion, and secularism.

Lucinda Ramberg received a bachelor's degree in English literature from Bryn Mawr College in 1984 and a master's degree in theology from Union Theological Seminary in 1989. Prior to beginning doctoral studies, she worked for over 10 years as a community organizer and activist in New York City and San Francisco on issues of racial and economic justice, gender violence, and sexuality rights. She received her PhD in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006, where she also completed a designated emphasis in gender, women, and sexuality and a master's degree in cultural anthropology. She was a Mellon Fellow at the Society for the Humanities and the Program in Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality at Cornell University in 2006-07. Her research and training have received support from the National Institutes of Health, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at UC Berkeley, and the American Association for University Women.

Photograph courtesy Lucinda Ramberg.