Dr Lucian Wong

Lucian Wong, DPhil (Oxon), is Baba Bhuman Shah Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and Editor of the Journal of Hindu Studies (Oxford University Press). His research focuses on colonial Hindu intellectual history and vernacular religion in early modern and modern Bengal. 

His current monograph project, Devotional Transformation: Vaishnavism, Modernity, and the Vertical Self, offers a study of the life and religious work of the late colonial Bengali Vaishnava leader Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinod, who directly prefigured the transnational trends that became a distinctive feature of the twentieth and twenty-first century landscape of Krishna bhakti. Positioned at the intersection of discourses in Religious Studies, South Asian History, Subaltern Studies, and Postcolonial Theory, Devotional Transformation makes critical interventions in two broader domains: At one level, it challenges a deeply entrenched, diffusionist master-narrative surrounding the emergence of modernity in the subcontinent, highlighting the ways in which premodern Hindu traditions were mined by colonial Hindus as potent resources for dwelling in modernity. At another, it proffers a template for studying religious agents that, while taking historical conditions and social location seriously, does not lose sight of the essential drive to self-transformation—or “verticality”—to which religious life frequently gives expression, along with its explanatory force.

He currently co-directs the following research projects: Rethinking Hinduism in Colonial India; Body and Embodiment in the Middle Bengali Imaginary; and Digital Humanities and Hindu Studies. He offers tutorials in Hinduism for Oxford’s Faculty of Theology and Religion and in Indian Philosophy for the University’s Faculty of Philosophy, and regularly leads readings in Middle Bengali at the OCHS. He has linguistic competence in Middle and Modern Bengali and Sanskrit.