Bio

Zehra Mehdi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University and holds MA degrees in Clinical Psychology from Delhi University, India, and Religious Studies from Columbia University. She is a practicing psychoanalytic therapist working with religious and sexual minorities since 2010. Her research interests include psychoanalytic ethnography, anthropology of religion, religious nationalism, political violence, religious minorities, secularism, resistance literature, mourning, and Partition Literature. Mehdi’s doctoral project explores the psychoanalytic role of religion in the lives of persecuted minorities through an ethnography of Muslim ethical responses to Hindu nationalism.