Jon Keune

Biography

Jon Keune (pronounced koi-nee) is a scholar of religion, society, and transregionalism working especially in western India as well as Taiwan and Japan. His current research project traces the legacies of B.R. Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism in 1956 as they play out his followers within and beyond India. Through community-engaged scholarship, he is documenting what Buddhism means and does for Ambedkarite professionals as they migrate and settle in new lands, and thus offer new windows into the nature of religion, spirituality, and cultural identification today.

Keune’s earlier scholarship focused on popular, devotional (bhakti) Hindu movements and their relationships to caste, especially the Varkari tradition and its hagiographical literature in Marathi between 1600 and the present. His book Shared Devotion, Shared Food: Equality and the Bhakti-Caste Question in Western India explored how the idea of social equality became normative for analyzing bhakti traditions’ social effects, displacing earlier nondualist and theological terms that Marathi authors used to speak about caste and bhakti.  He co-edited Regional Communities of Devotion in South Asia: Insiders, Outsiders, and Interlopers on bhakti traditions and their many others.  He has published articles in journals, edited books, and encyclopedias on bhakti, Marathi literature, and comparative and transregional studies, as can be found in the ORCiD site linked above.

Keune’s work has been supported by the Fulbright Program (three times), the American Institute of Indian Studies, the AAS Northeast Asia Council, the American Library Association, postdoctoral fellowships in Göttingen and Houston, and many university-internal grants. During the Fall Semester 2024, Keune is in Germany as a Research Fellow at the Max-Weber-Kolleg at the University of Erfurt.   

In 2013, he co-founded the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network to bring together scholars of diverse regions and languages to study bhakti in new ways through annual symposia, publications, and the Bhakti Virtual Archive (BHAVA) — a digital humanities project with over 25 collaborators. Keune is also active in the Maharashtra Studies Group and the AAR Hagiology Seminar.

Education

 Ph.D., Columbia University, 2011 

 M.Div., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2002 

 B.A., St. Olaf College, 1997

Principal Scholarly Interests

Ambedkarite Buddhists, transnational Buddhism, cross-cultural translation, bhakti traditions, Dalit and subaltern movements, social history and historiography, equality studies, food in religion and society, early modern Marathi literature, transregional and comparative studies.