Timothy S. Dobe

Timothy Dobe is Professor of Religious Studies at Grinnell College and currently serves as chair of the department. He received his Th.D. from Harvard Divinity School (2007) and his M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary (1997). He is a specialist in South Asian religions and the author of Hindu Christian Faqir: Modern Monks, Global Christianity and Indian Sainthood (2015). He was an ACLS Burkhardt Fellow at Duke University ’s Islamic Studies Center in 2018-19 where he worked on his current research project on Muslims and Gandhi in neglected Urdu language sources. Since then, his research has grown to explore intentional communities, fieldwork methods, transnational Buddhism in France and activist networks in the U.S. His courses at Grinnell focus on South Asian religions, exploring themes of performance and asceticism, comparative religion, post-secularism, colonialism and postcolonialism and issues of peace and conflict. Most recently he has offered a range of courses in Grinnell’s Peace and Conflict Studies program and has developed a new religious studies course on Personal Growth.

His wider service to the field includes chairing the Hindu Studies group at the AAR, serving on the board of the Hindu Christian Studies Associate and serving as an Associate Editor for Journal of American Academy of Religion.