Dr. Eloisa Stuparich

Dr. Eloisa Stuparich received her Ph.D. in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture from Cornell University in 2016. Her research focuses on some contemporary developments of a South Asian religious movement, the Nāth Sampradāya. Her dissertation Treading the Frontiers of Hinduness: Yogi Naraharinath in 20th century Nepal examines the life and work of a Nepalese leader of the Nāth Sampradāya,Yogi Naraharinath (1915-2003), in transnational perspective.

While in Göttingen, she will analyze a contemporary religious network—the Latvian branch of the Nāth Sampradāya—to examine which narratives of Indo-European history are constituted by the interactions between Indian and Latvian practitioners of yoga. She will particularly focus on the parallels between the historical narratives of Latvian youths in the post-1991 configuration and Hindu nationalist anxieties in post-Independence India, both centered around the memory of foreign rule as a defining moment in the constitution of a nationalist consciousness. In both cases, the notion of a pristine Indo-European polytheistic identity challenged by the spread of Abrahamic religious, first, and by an imposed secularization, later, is constituted through interactions that defy any clear-cut dichotomy between European and Asian postcolonial narratives.