Ritual Research

The bustling pilgrimage town of Nashik, nestled along the Godavari River in Maharashtra, India, was alive with energy. Streets were teeming with the sights, sounds, and smells of a festival honoring the elephant-headed deity Ganesh, the remover of obstacles and god of new beginnings highly revered in both Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

Elizabeth Cecil, the Timothy Gannon Endowed Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University, then a recent high school graduate, stood in awe on the street, experiencing directly the Hindu religious practices she’d previously only read about as part of her exchange year abroad. This eye-opening trip in 2000 highlighted how religion can manifest in the spaces and rhythms of daily life and became a cornerstone of the career she’d go on to build.

“I embraced the experience, and that encounter with Hindu traditions sparked my interest in studying religion,” Cecil said. “Now, my work highlights how religious traditions aren’t just relics of the past — they’re alive and integral to contemporary life in countries around the world.”

Cecil earned her Ph.D. in Asian religions and Sanskrit from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2016. Before joining FSU’s faculty in 2018, she held positions at Leiden University in the Netherlands and the British Museum in London, England, where she focused extensively on South Asian collections, including paintings, inscriptions, images of goddesses and other historical pieces.

The Nebraska native specializes in Hindu traditions in South and Southeast Asia and conducts research in Sanskrit, Old Javanese, Khmer, Dutch and French. At FSU, she teaches courses on South Asian religions and covers topics including Hinduism, ecology, goddesses, yoga traditions and more. Each semester, she aims to broaden how students think about religion beyond religious practice and observance.

“Religion isn’t just about belief,” Cecil said. “It’s a dynamic force that shapes how people relate to their environment, each other, their histories and community. I investigate how religious traditions are grounded in the material world, including architecture, art and rituals, and how these elements combine to create a sense of meaning and belonging.”

“Professor Cecil is an exceptionally good citizen of FSU. She’s a popular teacher who builds bridges between departments and scholars that can be challenging to build. Her excellence and leadership skills have taught me what the study of religion can become — an indispensable transdisciplinary site for the production of knowledge.”

— Martin Kavka, professor and chair of the FSU Department of Religion

Cecil’s research takes her far from Tallahassee, and she conducts fieldwork in countries including India, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos and Vietnam. By exploring historical sites, she works to determine how spatial dimensions of temples, rivers, mountains, and cities are shaped by religious narratives and how religious devotees move through these landscapes.

In her 2024 article in Arts Orientalis, “Agastya and the Ecology of the Śaiva Guru,” Cecil explored how early Śaiva traditions in South and Southeast Asia cultivated a religious ecology — a network of relationships among humans, deities and the natural world. Focusing on the sage Agastya, she traced how Śaiva gurus were represented as ecological agents whose iconography and mythology signaled their power to foster prosperity, neutralize cosmic threats, and sustain communities across diverse landscapes, from India to Vietnam and Java.

“Fieldwork is a process of discovery that’s exhilarating and essential to my work,” Cecil said. “I love being on-site and attentive to the material and visual aspects of the spaces I’m researching. When analyzing visual sources like inscriptions recorded on stone slabs or temple walls, I take in the whole space to fully understand that particular spatial context. That’s not something I can accomplish from an archive or computer.”

At FSU, Cecil is affiliated with the university’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Center and is in the planning stages for an FSU Museum of Fine Arts exhibition exploring the significance of water in Indigenous religious traditions in the Global South. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Council of American Overseas Research Centers and the Getty Foundation.

She’s also part of the PURANA Project, an international research collaboration based at Leiden University and supported by the European Research Council. One of the project’s initiatives, PURANA Media, is an open access, peer-reviewed journal hosted through FSU Libraries focused on modes of cultural production encompassed by the term “purāṇa,” a Sanskrit word designating things as “ancient” or “primordial.”

“Professor Cecil is an exceptionally good citizen of FSU,” said Martin Kavka, professor and chair of the FSU Department of Religion. “She’s a popular teacher who builds bridges between departments and scholars that can be challenging to build. Her excellence and leadership skills have taught me what the study of religion can become — an indispensable transdisciplinary site for the production of knowledge.”

Dena Reddick is an FSU alumna who earned a master's degree in history in May 2020.