The Denison University Goodspeed Lecture Series will host Aparna Rao to discuss fundamentalist religious movements from the perspective of village populations. This convocation, set for 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday (Nov. 9) in Slayter Auditorium, is free and open to the public.

Rao is a specialist on gender, identity and systems of values and beliefs among nomadic and peripatetic peoples. She is currently a research fellow in the department of anthropology at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne in Germany. Rao has spent several years doing field research among peripatetic communities in France and Afghanistan; pastoral, nomadic, transhumant and peasant communities in the western Himalayas; and agrarian and agro-pastoralist peoples in western India.

Between 1994 and 1998 Rao was co-chair of the Commission on Nomadic Peoples of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and was a member of the board of directors of the Gypsy Lore Society. She also has held teaching positions in the department of sociology/anthropology at the University of Cologne and in the department of ethnology at the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

Rao is one of the editors of the journal "Nomadic Peoples" and is the author or co-author of more than two-dozen books and articles on nomads in Afghanistan and India. Rao most recently wroteAutonomy: Life Cycle, Gender and Status Among Himalayan Pastoralists, a book about the Bakkarwal of Jammu and Kashmir, and co-editedNomadism in South Asiawith Michael Casimir.

Rao was born in India and won a scholarship from the French government to study French language and literature and sociology/anthropology as an undergraduate at the University of Strasbourg in France. She earned her doctorate from the University of Paris in 1980.

About Denison:

Denison University, founded in 1831, is an independent, residential liberal arts institution located in Granville, Ohio. A highly selective college enrolling 2,100 full-time undergraduate students from all 50 states and dozens of foreign countries, Denison is a place where innovative faculty and motivated students collaborate in rigorous scholarship, civic engagement and the cultivation of independent thinking.

For press inquiries:

Name

Barbara Stambaugh

Position Title

Director, Media Relations

Primary Email

stambaughb@denison.edu

Business Phone

(740) 587-8575