Research
Lucinda Ramberg is an Assistant Professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology.   Her research in South Asia and the United States has roots in longstanding engagements with sexuality, gender, religion and the nature of power.   It focuses in particular on the body as an artifact of culture and power in relation to questions of sexual subjectivity and citizenship.  She holds a PhD in Medical Anthropology and an MA in Cultural Anthropology from UC Berkeley and an MA in Theology from Union Theological Seminary.  She has taught at UC Berkeley, Cornell University and Pune University.  At the University of Kentucky in 2007 - 2008, she is teaching Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies in the Social Sciences; Introduction to Queer Studies; Queer Theory and Kinship Studies; and Anthropology, Religion, Secularism.  Her current book project, an ethnography of ‘sacred prostitution’ and its reform, is entitled Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis, Ethics, Kinship.  This manuscript considers the relationship among processes of secularization, the criminalization of marginal religion and the normalization of outcaste female sexuality in the context of postcolonial India.