Gananath Obeyesekere is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, where he taught for 20 years before retiring in 2000.
Among his books are Land Tenure in Village Ceylon: A Sociological and Historical Study; Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience; The Cult of the Goddess Pattini; Buddhism Transformed (with Richard Gombrich); The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology; The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, and Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist and Greek Rebirth.
Obeyesekere was the Rajni Kothari Chair Professor at CSDS from October 2008 to April 2009. He delivered the annual Rajni Kothari Chair lecture on ‘Buddhism, Political Violence and the Dilemmas of Democracy in Sri Lanka’ at CSDS on 24 April 2009.