Kirin Narayan was born in India to an American mother and Indian father, and moved to the United States to attend college in 1976. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California—Berkeley. Her first book, Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (1989), won the first Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association and was co-winner of the Elsie Clews Prize for Folklore from the American Folklore Society. She then published a novel, Love, Stars and All That (1994). In the course of researching women’s oral traditions in Kangra, Northwest Himalayas, she collaborated with Urmila Devi Sood to bring together a book of tales with discussions of their meaning and ethnographic context in Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (1997). An interest in family stories and diasporic experience inspired My Family and Other Saints (2007). Teaching ethnographic writing led her to compose Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012), that includes galvanizing extracts, prompts and writing exercises. Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses of the Himalayan Foothills (2016)  emerges from a long association with women singers in Kangra. She is currently completing a book with Ken George provisionally titled Cave of the Ancestors: Myth, Mystery and the Artisans of Ellora.

Kirin Narayan has received support from the Australian Research Council, National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the School of American Research, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the University of Wisconsin Graduate School. She received a Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Wisconsin in 2011. She currently serves on the Committee of Selection for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS PROFILE IS INCOMPLETE AND DOES NOT INCLUDE ALL OF PROFESSOR NARAYAN'S PUBLICATIONS. THE METRICS GENERATED HERE ARE INACCURATE. 

social life of narrative; ethnographic writing; ethnographic genres; expressive culture; oral traditions, folklore; gender; life stories; anthropology of religion; anthropology of creativity; South Asia; South Asian diaspora