Dennis McGilvray

  • Professor
  • (PH.D. • UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO • 1974)
Office Hours

By Appointment

My ethnographic interests are in South Asia, with a research focus on the Tamils and Muslims of south India and Sri Lanka. My book, Crucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka (Duke 2008), analyzes matrilineal Hindu and Muslim kinship, caste structure, religious ritual, and ethnic identities in the Tamil-speaking region of eastern Sri Lanka, an area that was deeply affected by the island’s civil war. I also co-edited a collection of essays resulting from a multidisciplinary NSF project entitled Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions (McGilvray and Gamburd, eds., Routledge 2010). The fieldwork that I am currently engaged in explores transnational Sufism and Muslim saints’ shrines, as well as matrilocal household patterns and dowry marriage among Tamils and Muslims (Moors) in Sri Lanka and South India.  A published photographer (Symbolic Heat, Mapin 1998), I am also interested in visual anthropology and alternative modes of cultural representation. Before retiring from the classroom in 2014, I taught a lower division course on Tamil culture; upper division courses on Symbolic Anthropology, Foundations of Theory, and South Asian ethnography; and a graduate seminar on Ethnography and Cultural Theory.  I am the recent past president of the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies.

Recent Publications:

  • Forthcoming. A House for Every Daughter: Matrilocal Marriage and Dowry in Sri Lanka and South India. Rutgers University Press.
  • 2026. Engaging with Islamic Inheritance: Matrilocal Marriage and Women’s Dowry Houses in Sri Lanka and the Coromandel Coast of Tamil Nadu. In Mahmood Kooria, ed., Customizing Islamic Law: Matrilineal Muslims of the Indian Ocean. Routledge. 31-61.
  • 2025. From Chicago to Sri Lanka: How I Tackled Tamil in the Field. In Margherita Trento, et al., eds., For the Love of Tamil: Essays in Honor of E. Annamalai. Series Minor. Naples: UniOr Press. 507-515.  http://www.fedoabooks.unina.it/index.php/fedoapress/catalog/book/691
  • 2022. Sufis in Sri Lanka: A Fieldwork Story. In Mark P. Whitaker, et al., eds., Multi-religiosity in Contemporary Sri Lanka: Innovation, Shared Spaces, Contestation. Routledge. 207-219.
  • 2014. A Matrilineal Sufi Shaykh in Sri Lanka. South Asia History and Culture 5(2): 246-261.