Kirin Narayan

Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1987
Professor of Anthropology
At UW-Madison since 1989

Cultural Anthropology

Affiliations : Folklore Program, Religious Studies Program, and Center for South Asia

Research

Professor Narayan will be on leave in 2006-2007, writing a book on women's sung mythology in the Himalayan foothill region of Kangra, Northwest India, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to long-term fieldwork on oral traditions in South Asia, she is also researching the South Asian diaspora, and the role of narratives in the transmission of identity. She is also working on making explicit the craft of ethnographic writing in dialogue with other narrative genres.

Teaching

Professor Narayan teaches courses that include Anthropology of South Asia, Anthropology of Life Stories, Anthropological Approaches to Folklore, South Asian Diaspora, South Asian Americans: An Ethnographic Approach, Ethnographic Writing

Select Publications

2008 The Ascetic Practice of Eating Sweets: Transcribing Oral Narrative. Special Issue, Transcription. Interval(le)s II.2-III.1: 597-606

2008 “Or in Other Words:” Traversing Registers of Language and Levels of Generality in Scholarly Writing. Special issue, Grand Theory. Journal of Folklore Research 45 (1): 83-90

2008 Stella Stories. In The Folklore Muse: Poetry, Fiction and Other Reflections by Folklorists. Frank de Caro ed., pp. 128-136. Logan: Utah State University Press.

2008 Showers of Flowers: A.K. Ramanujan and an Indian Folktale. Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche 2 (1): 5-22

2008 Singing and Retelling the Past. In Living with Stories. William Schneider, ed. Pp. 97-129. Logan: Utah State University Press.

2008 Moving Stories: Beyond the Local in Ethnography and Fiction. In Self and subject in motion: South Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans. Kathryn Robinson, ed. Pp. 60-76. London: Palgrave.

2008 My Family and Other Saints. New Delhi: Harper Collins. (Indian edition of University of Chicago Press publication in 2007)

2002 Old Deccan Days or Hindoo Fairy Legends by Mary Frere . Edited with an introduction by Kirin Narayan. (reprint of Old Deccan Days or Hindoo Fairy Legends Current in South India , fifth ed. 1898). Series in Classic Folk and Fairy Tales, Jack Zipes, Series Editor. Santa Barbara: ABC Clio.

1997 Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales in collaboration with Urmila Devi Sood. New York: Oxford University Press.

1994 Love, Stars and All That . New York: Pocket Books. New Delhi: Penguin India. London: Piatkus Books.

1993 Creativity/Anthropology . Smadar Lavie, Kirin Narayan and Renato Rosaldo, eds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

1989 Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching . Series in Contemporary Ethnography, and Publication of the American Folklore Society, New Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas. (Winner of the 1990 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, American Anthropological Association, and co-winner of the Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for Folklore, American Folklore Society.)

Contact

Office: 5313 Sewell Social Science Bldg.
Office phone: (608) 262-2070 or 2866
Email address: knarayan@wisc.edu

Books by Kirin Narayan