Profile

Dr. Ravi Nandan Singh has taught Sociology for more than a decade at the Hindu College, University of Delhi. He has also taught, briefly, at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi and was associated with the department for M.Phil. and Ph.D. research supervision.

Singh’s work emphasises on a sociology of the dead. He pitches death as a connected event to life and society by positing the empiricisms of the dead at the centre of his enquiry. His forthcoming book on ethnography of funeral travelling in Banaras is based on following the dead across the multiple sites of river bank open-air cremation, electric crematorium, hospital, morgue, home, Shaivite hermitage-clinic and autobiographical necrology. His ethnographic work on the dead and death published as essays has been well received. He uses his work on the dead, death, mourning and grief as an affirmative link to his other research interests.

His other research interests include medical sociology; forms of religious and spiritual lives; morbid humour; literary sociology; philosophy of names; kinship.

Singh has a growing collection of world ethnographic films and he makes use of his collection to create a combination of the spoken, textual and filmic as key elements in the teaching and learning of sociology at the department.