Vijaya Nagarajan
Dr. Vijaya Nagarajan, born in a south Indian village along the sacred Kaveri River, was raised in India and the US. Educated mostly in the Washington DC area, she also attended educational institutions in New Delhi and Madurai, while her undergraduate and Ph.D. training was completed at University of California, Berkeley. Teaching in the Department of Theology/Religious Studies (Department Chair 2018-2020) and Program in Environmental Studies at the University of San Francisco (USF), her courses include Hinduism: Climate; Commons: Land, Water, and Air (a required course for all USF Environmental Studies majors); Religious Ethics: Engineering; Community Internships; Voice, Memory, and Landscape: Spiritual Autobiographies of Place; Introduction to Hinduism; Religion and Environment, Religion and Nonviolence, and others. She has received fellowships from Fulbright-Hayes, Women’s Studies in Religion Associate Fellowship at Harvard Divinity School, American Institute of Indian Studies, NEH Chair (USF); American Academy of Religion, and Davies Chair (USF); The Mesa Refuge Residency (1998, 2023) and Djerassi Residency (2013). As co-director (with Lee Swenson (1984—current) of two tiny volunteer-run, research/activist organizations, Recovery of the Commons Project and Institute for the Study of Natural & Cultural Resources, she has organized numerous conferences, public events, seminars, gatherings on the commons, kolam, ritual, ecology, art, waste, and climate ethics with leading thinkers and writers, including Ivan Illich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams, Amitav Ghosh; W.S. Merwin, Vandana Shiva, C.V. Seshadiri, Chandralekha, Grace Paley, Lewis Hyde, and many others. Her book, Feeding A Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual, and Ecology in southern India, An Exploration of the Kolam (Oxford University Press, 2019) celebrates a popular Indian women’s ritual art, the kolam, and the multiple ways in which beauty embodies ethics. She is working currently on a book on Hinduism, Climate, and the Commons. For many decades, she has been active both at the American Academy of Religion and in environmental movements in the US and India.
