Sohini Sarah Pillai

Dr. Sohini Sarah Pillai is Assistant Professor of Religion, Director of Film and Media Studies, and the Marlene Crandell Francis Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Kalamazoo College where she teaches courses on religious traditions in South Asia, religion in cinema, and epic literature. She is a comparatist of South Asian religious narratives and her area of specialization is the Mahabharata and the Ramayana epic traditions.

She is the author of Krishna’s Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative (the American Academy of Religion’s Religion in Translation Series at Oxford University Press, 2024) and the co-editor with Nell Shapiro Hawley of Many Mahabharatas (SUNY Series in Hindu Studies at State University of New York Press, 2021). Ongoing projects include Women in Hindu Traditions, a co-authored sourcebook with Emilia Bachrach and Jennifer D. Ortegren in the Women in Religions Series at New York University Press, and a monograph about cinematic adaptations of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

She is also co-chair of the steering committee for the Hinduism Unit at the American Academy of Religion, an associate editor of Reading Religion, and a member of the Spring 2025 Sacred Writes public scholarship training cohort for scholars of religion, gender, and sexuality.

She received her PhD from UC Berkeley, her MA from Columbia University, and her BA from Wellesley College. To learn more about her work, please see her CV.