Nicole Karapanagiotis

Religious Studies doctoral candidate and 2009-2010 Dissertation-Year Fellow

I am a doctoral candidate focusing on the Hindu traditions in both India and the Diaspora.  My primary areas of interest include theistic Vedanta philosophy, Vaishnava devotion, and religion and technology.  My doctoral dissertation, which is a study of the performance of Hindu ritual worship (puja) to Vishnu and Shiva on the Internet, combines all of these interests.

As I embark on writing my dissertation, I am grateful for the 2009-2010 Religious Studies Dissertation-Year Fellowship that I was so generously awarded by the Religious Studies Department.  With this fellowship, I will be moving to central New Jersey for the year so that I can interview Hindu devotees regarding their practices of cyber-devotion to Vishnu and Shiva.  Through these ethnographic interviews, I hope to gain a fuller sense of not only the specific practices involved in Hindu cyber-devotion, but also the ways in which Hindu devotees understand this new form of religious ritual.  This ethnographic data, coupled with textual and theoretical analyses, will comprise the greater part of my dissertation.