About | Courses | Calendar | Resources | Affiliates | Exhibitions

---

Faculty

Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Professor (1992). Growing up in India, she received her B. A. from Goshen College and her Ph.D. in South Asian Language and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in performance studies, with a particular interest in gender. She has carried out extensive fieldwork in India, working with both Hindu and Muslim popular traditions. Her new book is titled In Amma's Healing Room: Gender & Vernacular Islam in South India (Indiana University Press: 2006). The book addresses questions of religious and gender identities and boundaries in a healing practice of female Muslim folk healers in the South Indian city of Hyderabad. She spent the academic year 1999-2000 in Tirupati, South India, where she conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the goddess tradition of Gangamma. She is currently writing a book on this tradition titled: When the World Becomes Female: The Gangamma Goddess Tradition of South India. She is also the author of Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India (Cornell: 1996), and 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).