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Faculty

Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Professor (1992). Joyce Flueckiger grew up in India until the age of eighteen, as the daughter of Mennonite missionaries. She returned to the U.S. to attend Goshen College, where she received her B.A. in English. She earned her Ph.D. in South Asian Language and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in performance studies and anthropology of religion, with a particular interest in gender. She has carried out extensive fieldwork in India, working with both Hindu and Muslim popular traditions. She has received research support from the American Institute of Indian Studies and Fulbright.

Flueckiger’s latest book is titled In Amma's Healing Room: Gender & Vernacular Islam in South India (Indiana University Press: 2006). The book analyzes religious and gender identities and boundaries in a healing practice of female Muslim folk healers in the South Indian city of Hyderabad. She is currently writing a book on the goddess tradition and jatara/festival of Gangamma (one of seven village-goddess sisters), based on fieldwork conducted in Tirupati, South India. Her book in progress is titled: When the World Becomes Female. She is also the author of Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India (Cornell: 1996), has published numerous articles on South Asian folklore, and is co-editor of and contributor to Oral Epics in India (1989) and Boundaries of the Text: Epic Performances in South and Southeast Asia (1991).

Flueckiger’s seminars and courses include: Performance and Ethnography in West and South Asia; Life History Narratives and Methods; Women, Religion and Ethnography; Dance and Embodied Knowledge in the Indian Context, Modern Hinduism; and Religion, Health and Healing. She received Emory’s highest award for teaching, the Emory Williams Teaching Award, in 2003.