Dr Bayly is Reader in Historical Anthropology in the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology. Her research focuses on colonialism and its cultural afterlife in Asia ’s former French and British colonies. For several years she has been conducting ethnographic research in Vietnam as part of a larger comparative project on empire, nationalism and post-colonial transformations in a variety of periods and settings. She also has a long-standing research interest in India, where she has focused on caste, religious conversion and a variety of translocal social and cultural movements. She was editor of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 2001-04, and has theoretical interests in the study of modernity, globalisation, theories of historical change, and in the disciplinary interface between history and anthropology. Her books include Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age. Vietnam, India and Beyond (Cambridge University Press: 2007). She has also published studies of the Indian caste system and of Indian religion in its historical and anthropological contexts.