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Biography
PhD (South Asian Religions), Columbia University, 2012 (expected) MPhil (South Asian Religions), Columbia University, 2009 (expected) MA (Religious Studies), Indiana University-Bloomington, 2006 BA (Religion), Davidson College, 2000
Patton Burchett is a PhD student in South Asian religious history and culture. His work focuses primarily on traditions of Hindu bhakti and tantra in north India during the early modern period. Patton also studies theoretical and topical issues related to the category of “magic” (and its relation to “religion,” “science,” etc.) and holds strong research interests in the field of international human rights as well, particularly in the Dalit movement in contemporary India. Patton’s secondary interests extend to the history of Sufi Islam in South Asia and the development of Buddhism in both South and East Asia (particularly, the Ch’an tradition in Tang China).
Patton’s MA research focused on issues of transgression, asceticism, language, and aesthetic experience in the religious praxis of the medieval Kashmiri Shaiva tradition. His PhD dissertation research examines indigenous notions of “magic” and “religion” emerging in the context of the so-called “bhakti movement” in north India, c. 1500-1750 CE, and how the rise of bhakti affected the practice and representation of tantric religiosity, seen most clearly in the community of the Nath yogis. The project centers on developments involving the Kacchawaha ruling family of Amber/Jaipur and the monastic community of Galta (as well as the important Vaishnava communities in Braj/Brindavan), but it also aims to explore the ways in which the closely related categories of bhakti and tantra, religion and magic, were appropriated and translated to serve the varying agendas of European Orientalist scholars, British colonial officials, and Indian nationalists.
Patton has co-coordinated two graduate conferences, the Columbia University Religion Department’s “Belief Matters: Re-conceptualizing Belief and its Use” (April 2009), and the Indiana University Religious Studies Department’s “Embodying Volatile Borderlands: Religion, Gender, and Sex(uality)” (April 2006). He has published articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (“The ‘Magical’ Language of Mantra,” 76:4 [2008]) and the International Journal of Hindu Studies (“Bhakti Rhetoric in the Hagiography of ‘Untouchable’ Saints: Discerning Bhakti’s Ambivalence on Caste and Brahminhood” [forthcoming]).
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