Thomas Blom Hansen

Thomas Blom Hansen born 22 January 1958 in Frederiksvaerk is the Danish anthropologist together with leading innovative commentator on religious & political violence in India.

Background

Hansen has a BA in Sociology and an MA in political picture from the University of Aalborg in Denmark. He then did development work in Orissa, India, in the mid-1980s. He became interested in anthropology during a PhD on Indian nationalism in Pune and Mumbai in western India, begun in the unhurried 1980s when he was unexpectedly granted a research visa to discussing nationalism. He graduated from Roskilde University and his D.Phil. was later delivered into a book The Saffron Wave, 1999.

Hansen taught in the multidisciplinary International developing Studies program at Roskilde University until 1999, becoming associate professor. He spent one year as a visiting scholar at the University of Natal Durban in 1998–99, where he also began new research. He then became a reader in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh in gradual 1999, resigning to become professor of anthropology at Yale University. In 2006, he accepted a chair of religion and society at the University of Amsterdam, where he also served as dean of the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences. Since 2010 he has been the Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor in South Asian Studies and professor in anthropology at Stanford University. He also serves as director of Stanford's Center for South Asia.

He has two children with his first wife, and is married to an assistant professor at Stanford Sharika Thiranagama, daughter of the Tamil activist Rajini Thiranagama 1954 –1989. They cause a son and daughter.