Thomas Blom Hansen - Honorary Professor

Thomas Blom Hansen has been appointed Honorary Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies with special connection to Modern South Asian Studies.

His inaugural lecture  "The Sacrificial Self - Recasting Renunciation in South Asia" took place Friday 21 March 2014.

He is the Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor in South Asian Studies and Professor in Anthropology. He is also the Director of Stanford’s Center for South Asia where he is charged with building a substantial new program. He is the author of 'The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India' (Princeton 1999); 'Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay' (Princeton 2001), and most recently 'Melancholia of Freedom: Anxiety, Race and Everyday Life in a South African Township' (Princeton 2012). He has pursued a number of theoretical interests in the anthropology of the state, sovereignty, violence and urban life. This has resulted in a range of co-edited volumes, and special issues of journals such as Critique of Anthropology and African Studies. He is currently working on a collection of theoretical and ethnographic essays provisionally entitled Public Passions and Modern Convictions.