Julia Cassaniti is an anthropologist of mind and culture in contemporary religious contexts of transnational Asia. Her work examines relationships between social, mental and physical influences on health and well-being and the patterned approaches by which people construct reality through idiosyncratic implementations of cultural ideologies. Dr. Cassaniti has specialized in Theravāda Buddhist interpretations in Northern Thailand, with ethnographic emphases on embodiment, including issues of gender and sexuality, and ideology, both from past texts and popular media. Her books include Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia (Cornell U. Press); Universalism Without Uniformity: Explorations in Mind and Culture (U. Chicago Press); and Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community (Cornell U. Press), which won the American Anthropological Association’s Stirling Prize for Best Book in Psychological Anthropology. Her current interests include temporality, attention and perception, and the effects of their different considerations for everyday life and mental disorder in Thailand, Japan and around the world.

Dr. Cassaniti received a B.A. in cognitive psychology from Smith College and a Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She has conducted postdoctoral research as a Culture and Mind Fellow at Stanford University and has held previous faculty positions at Cornell University; Chiang Mai University; the University of California, San Diego; and Washington State University. 

As an incoming professor of religious studies at UVA, Cassaniti will be teaching graduate and undergraduate courses this year on Buddhism, gender, mental health and ethnographic fieldwork.