My ethnographic interests are in South Asia, with a research focus on the Tamils and Muslims of south India and Sri Lanka.  My recent book, Crucible of Conflict (Duke 2008), analyzes matrilineal Hindu and Muslim kinship, caste structure, religious ritual, and ethnic identities in the Tamil-speaking region of eastern Sri Lanka, an area that has been deeply affected by the island’s civil war. Currently I am exploring transnational Sufism and Muslim saints’ shrines in Sri Lanka and southern India, and I am co-editing a volume of essays from my multidisciplinary NSF project on Sri Lankan recovery from the 2004 tsunami. A published photographer (Symbolic Heat, Mapin 1998), I am also interested in visual anthropology and alternative modes of cultural representation. At CU I teach a lower division course on Tamil culture; upper division courses on Symbolic Anthropology, Foundations of Theory, and South Asian ethnography; and a graduate seminar on Ethnography and Cultural Theory.