Amanda Lucia is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California-Riverside. She is author of White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals (2020), which intervenes at the intersection of whiteness, religious exoticism, and contemporary yoga spirituality. Her previous publications include Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (2014), and numerous book chapters and articles, including “Flooding the Web: Absence-Presence and the Media Strategies of Nithyananda’s Digital Empire,” “Persistent Fictions: Race and the Global Gurus of the Long Twentieth Century,” “Guru Sex: Charisma, Proxemic Desire, and the Haptic Logics of the Guru Disciple Relationship,” and “Hinduism without Religion: Amma’s Movement in America.” She is also the Principal Investigator for the Religion & Sexual Abuse Project,  www.religionandsexualabuseproject.org. Her current research focuses on celebrity gurus, and negotiations between religious authority and secular law.

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