THOMAS BLOM HANSEN is the Reliance–Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology, and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. He has written on Hindu nationalism, Hindu–Muslim conflicts, and urban politics in India, as well as melancholia, memory, and cultural politics in post-apartheid South Africa.
He is the author of The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India; Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay; Cool Passion: The Political Theology of Modern Convictions; and Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa, as well as a number of edited collections, most recently Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (edited with C. Jaffrelot and A. Chatterji).