Shiva Sai Ram Urella

Shiva Sai Ram Urella is a Lector of Telugu in the South Asia Studies Council. He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Emory University and an Integrated Master of Arts in Political Science from the University of Hyderabad, India. His dissertation project focused on the ritual repertoire of Telangana-based ritual specialists called Ogguvandlu, who perform rituals and Telugu oral narratives of deities Mallanna and Yellamma. His research focuses on the relationship between language, material practices, oral narratives, guising, deity possession, caste identities, and state-led interventions in contemporary South Indian Hindu traditions. He received the Taraknath Das Memorial Junior Research Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies for 2022-2023.

He has presented his work at the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, the AIIS Junior Fellows conference, Emory Telugu Studies, South Asia Seminar Series, and co-organized the 2024 Madison Telugu Studies symposium. At Emory, he worked as a teaching associate and as a catalogue assistant for South Asia collections at the Robert W. Woodruff Library. His future projects include a book monograph and a digital humanities project based on his dissertation.