Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Williams College, Massachusetts, USA, Joel Lee teaches and conducts research on religion, the state, and caste in South Asia. In particular his work concerns the strategies and tactics of Dalits to combat structural deprivation, navigate the politics of religious majoritarianism, and contend with the sensory and environmental entailments of sanitation labor in colonial and postcolonial India. His research and teaching interests also include linguistic anthropology, semiotics, popular Hinduism and Islam, and Urdu and Hindi literature. Joel holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University.