Frank Korom

Frank Korom
145 Bay State Road, Suite 506
Boston, MA 02215
T: 617.358.0185; F: 617.358.3087
E: korom@bu.edu

Bio

A Professor of Religion and Anthropology, Frank J. Korom received degrees in Religious Studies and Anthropology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1984, before pursuing studies in India and Pakistan, where he earned certificates of recognition in a number of modern South Asian languages. He did his graduate work in folklore and folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, and was awarded the Ph.D. in 1992 for a dissertation on Dharmaraj, a local village deity worshipped in West Bengal from medieval times to the present. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, a Ford Foundation cultural consultant in India and Bangladesh, and curator of Asian and Middle Eastern collections at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe prior to his arrival at Boston University in the summer of 1998.

Among his research awards have been grants from the Institute of International Education, the Mellon Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the International Folk Art Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the American Academy of Religion, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. He is the author and editor of eight books, most recently South Asian Folklore (2006) and A Village of Painters (2006). An earlier book, Hosay Trinidad, won the Premio Pitre international book award in 2002. He also served as Editor of Religious Studies Review from 2001-2003 and currently serves on a variety of editorial and advisory boards. In 2004-2005, he was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in India, where he conducted fieldwork on the Patuas, itinerant scroll painters residing in rural West Bengal. This project culminated in a major museum exhibition in October of 2006. He is currently working on a project titled “The Making of a Transnational Sufi Family,” which is being supported by AISLS.

His research and teaching interests range from South Asian expressive traditions and contemporary religion to diaspora studies and transnationalism, which is reflected in his work on East Indians in the Caribbean, the global community of Tibetan refugees, and the peregrinations of a Sri Lankan Tamil Sufi saint. He is also interested in film, ritual, and performance studies.

Complete CV

Books

Village of Painters: Narrative Scrolls from West Bengal
By Frank Korom
Museum of New Mexico Press
September 30, 2006
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South Asian Folklore
By Frank Korom
Greenwood Press
April 1, 2006
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Hosay Trinidad
By Frank Korom
University of Pennsylvania Press
November 1, 2002
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Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions (South Asian Seminar Series)
Arjun Appadurai, Frank J. Korom, Margaret A. Mills
University of Pennsylvania Press
June 1, 1991
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Courses

• RN 103 Religions of the World: Eastern
• RN 108 New Age Spirituality
• RN 213 Hinduism
• RN 375/675 Culture, Society, amd Religion in South Asia
• RN 387/687 Anthropology of Religion
• RN 388/688 Oral Tradition as Verbal Art
• RN 442/742 Approaches to Myth
• RN 468/768 Symbol, Myth, and Rite
• GRS RN796 Social Science Approaches to Religion