Shiva Sai Ram Urella

Shiva Sai Ram Urella joins the FAS as Lector in Telugu in the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from Emory University and holds an Integrated Master of Arts in Political Science from the University of Hyderabad, India. His research explores the intersection of language, religion, performance, caste, and politics in Telangana, India. At Emory, he worked as a teaching associate for courses on religion and also as a catalogue assistant for South Asia collections at the Robert W. Woodruff Library. He received the Taraknath Das Memorial Junior Research Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies in 2022–2023 for his dissertation fieldwork. He has presented his work at the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, the AIIS Junior Fellows conference, and helped co-organize the 2024 Madison Telugu studies symposium. His future projects include a book monograph and a documentary based on his dissertation project about Telangana-based Bahujan ritual specialists who perform rituals and oral narratives of regional Hindu deities Mallanna and Yellamma.