Yale-NUS faculty awarded prestigious Claremont Prize

Dr Mahadev pictured in Yale-NUS College.

At Yale-NUS, faculty balance rigorous teaching work with excellence in their own research. Recently, Assistant Professor of Social Science (Anthropology) Neena Mahadev was awarded the Claremont Prize for the Study of Religion from Columbia University’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, for her study of Buddhist-Christian relations in Sri Lanka.

Dr Mahadev’s book, titled Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka, will be published by Columbia University Press later this year. It focuses on the tensions between Buddhism and different Christian denominations in a state that is constitutionally obliged to protect the former religion. Dr Mahadev studies how Buddhist revivalists and Christian evangelists respectively draw on ideas of karmic inheritance and the grace of God to model their vision for the nation’s future. She demonstrates how religious plurality and pluralism is expressed in everyday life—a phenomenon that mitigates the exclusivist religious rhetoric that is often espoused in the public sphere. In so doing, she pioneers a theorisation of a “multicameral” ethnographic approach; rather than studying religions from one singular vantage point, she tacks back and forth between study of several Buddhist and Christian communities, to consider the possibilities and impasses of religious pluralism in the country.

As part of the Prize, Dr Mahadev had the opportunity to workshop her book with three faculty members at Columbia specialising in anthropology, religious studies, and political history. “When I was nearly finished writing the book, they gave me constructive feedback on how to make my book stronger. I really benefitted from that, actually,” she shared.

Subsequently, she held a Visiting Fellow affiliation at Columbia University. Although her visiting affiliation was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Mahadev participated in conferences and talks surrounding her research at Columbia University, Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies on Buddhism (CEIB, Paris). In 2019-2020, she was also awarded a grant from Yale-NUS College’s Yap Kim Hao Memorial Fund to collaborate with researchers at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) to examine religion, media, and religious management of social distancing requirements in the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I met some interesting scholars in anthropology and religious studies, who sparked my imagination,” she spoke of her experiences.

Part of researching at Yale-NUS also means learning alongside and engaging budding researchers of the future. As part of Dr Mahadev’s work with ARI and as a result of the Yap Kim Hao Grant, some of her students from her course Religion and the Media Turn managed to participate in the project, producing ethnographies on religion and the pandemic that she described as “fantastic,” including publications on the ARI research blog.

Even before the publication of her book, Dr Mahadev’s research had already begun to garner wider attention. As testament to the importance of her work, in February 2023 she was invited to serve on the advisory team of the Pew Research Center’s International Religion project focusing on South and Southeast Asia. As she describes, “Studying religion is important for understanding even ‘secular’ societies, their political, economic, social and cultural inheritances, and their forward momentum and development.”

This is why she encourages students interested in pursuing projects in social sciences research to pay special attention to religion, even when it may not appear significant at first glance. “It’s fun to uncover what’s not obvious to the eye of the casual observer, and to discover what anthropological methods of participant-observation can enable one to do,” she shared.

“Taking on these projects, through anthropological methods, can be incredibly exhilarating!”