Swathi Gorle is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Art History with a concentration in Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies, specializing in religious heritage in South Asia. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Art History and Visual Arts along with a certification in Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies from Rutgers University. Her research examines contemporary notions of sacrality through pilgrimage circuits in Andhra Pradesh, India. Swathi’s research looks at the relationship between the dynamics of rapid urbanization and pilgrimage experience and how lived religion and ‘living heritage’ complicates work done in heritage studies that emphasize the presumed tensions between tradition and modernity and religious and secular futures. To examine these tensions, she focuses on the somatic and sensorial encounters that shape the embodied experience of pilgrims as they navigate between the city and sacred spaces of the Hindu temple.
Swathi Gorle