Kathryn Hardy is an anthropologist interested in language, mediation, and semiosis. Her research investigates emergent categories in diverse sites of social life: filmmaking, the mass celebration of Chhath Puja in Mumbai, and lives of water buffalo in Varanasi. Her first book project examines the social categories that emerge through the production and circulation of films in the Bhojpuri language, including new ideas of the “region” and new linguistically informed political identities.

Kathryn is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Ashoka University. Before coming to Ashoka, Kathryn was the Singh Fellow at Yale University in 2014-2015, and a Mellon Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her BA from Smith College, and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.