Dr. Emilia Bachrach’s ethnographic research has focused on how interpretations of religious texts inform and are informed by intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and by changing class, regional, and gender identities in contemporary western India.  Her monograph on this subject, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism, was published in 2022 as part of the American Academy of Religion’s “Religion in Translation Series” with Oxford University Press.

Dr. Bachrach’s developing research includes a study of how Hindu masculinities are negotiated through social media; there’s also a long-term ethnographic book project on Ahmedabad city’s Hindu women cultivating piety through ascetic practices.  She has also initiated new fieldwork that considers how retail shops (like fruterías) function as important sites for cultural and religious networking among newly relocated people from South Asia (namely, Pakistan) in Barcelona, Spain.  Besides, she is co-authoring a sourcebook on women in Hindu traditions with Sohini Sarah Pillai and Jennifer D. Ortegren.

Her writing has appeared in Fieldwork in Religion, the Journal of Hindu Studies, and the Journal of Vaishnava Studies.  Her 2019 book, In the Service of Krishna: Illustrating the Lives of Eighty-Four Vaishnavas from a 1702 Manuscript (Mapin Publishing), was featured in a discussion presented by the New Books Network.

Dr. Bachrach’s Fulbright-Nehru ethnographic project is examining a spectrum of women’s ascetic and non-ascetic experiences as collectively essential to the Swaminarayan Sampraday, which has strong roots in the western Indian state of Gujarat.  Through a study that places female practices of renunciation within the broader contexts of the Swaminarayan community life, this research aims to overturn enduring stereotypes about Indian asceticism and about women’s agency as contingent on resisting, rather than cultivating, religious norms.