Rohit Singh earned his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara, specializing in Tibetan and South Asian religions. Combining ethnographic, historical, and comparative perspectives, he has conducted extensive fieldwork with diverse Buddhist and Muslim communities in North India. His research focuses on three main areas: inter-religious dialogue in the Himalayas, religion and secularity in the public sphere, and the ethnography of Tantra.
Dr. Singh’s scholarship challenges disciplinary boundaries by bridging the fields of Buddhist Studies, Islam in South Asia, and the anthropology of religion. His work has been published in the Journal of Global Buddhism, HIMALAYA: The Journal for the Association of Nepal and Himalaya Studies, Entangled Religions, and Oxford Handbooks Online: Religion. His most recent book, The Ethnography of Tantra: Textures and Contexts of Living Tantric Traditions (co-edited with Carola E. Lorea), demonstrates how ethnography offers unique insight into living Tantric traditions throughout Asia. He is currently completing a new book manuscript, Buddhists and Muslims in the Indo-Himalayan Borderlands: Dialogue and Solidarity amid Polarization, which examines how Buddhist and Muslim communities in Ladakh sustain relationships of dialogue and solidarity in the context of rising polarization.
His research and fieldwork directly inform Dr. Singh’s teaching inside the classroom. He teaches courses on Asian Religions, Yoga, Meditation, and Magic, Death and Afterlife in World Religions, and Theory and Method in Religious Studies. Students regularly get to engage with Dr. Singh’s own firsthand field data, encountering religious practices, cultural traditions, and voices from around the world. His classes lean into high-impact, multimedia-driven learning, and his adventurous streak shows up in the form of games and local excursions. Looking ahead, he hopes to lead faculty-led study abroad trips to Asia, sharing the kind of learning adventures that shaped his own scholarship. Aware that we exist and succeed in community, Dr. Singh works to ensure that his classrooms serve as learning environments where a diversity of students can voice and develop their questions, comments, and critiques.
Off campus, Dr. Singh enjoys traveling, martial arts training, and playing video games. He cares deeply about animals, and you can often find him around town with his beloved dog, Padma.