Miki Chase

Biography

Śrī Anantnāth Chair in Jain Studies and Assistant Professor, Asian Languages and Cultures

Miki Chase is Assistant Professor in South Asian Studies and holds the Śrī Anantnāth  Endowed Chair in Jain Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on intersections of  religion, law, and gender in questions of care around death and dying in India, with a  specific focus on Jainism. 

Dr. Chase received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, and her doctoral work received the Mohini Jain Presidential Chair in Jain Studies Best Dissertation Prize (2024). Her research focuses on the contemporary practice of the legally contested Jain voluntary ritual fast until death known variably as sallekhanā, santhāra, or samādhi-maraṇa, examining how lay Jains reconcile ideals and concepts outlined in scripture with the interreligious pressures of urban life and modernization of death, foregrounding the centrality of women’s moral  ubjectivities in such negotiations. Her research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the American Institute for Indian Studies (AIIS), including the Rachel F. and Scott McDermott Junior Research Fellowship. Her book in progress is tentatively titled The Ambiguity of the Vow: Law, Kinship, and Gender in Pathologizing the Jain Fast Until Death. 

Prior to joining the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Chase was Bhagwan Munisuvrata Swami Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work has addressed issues such as end-of-life and palliative care, feminist perspectives on gender and voice in the family, and communal politics in law and the digital sphere. She has lectured for courses in religious studies, anthropology of religion, medical anthropology, and public health, as well as the International School for Jain Studies (ISSJS). 

Dr. Chase is affiliate faculty with the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Department of Anthropology, the Religious Studies Program, and the Center for South Asia. 

Dr. Chase is on research leave for the 2025-2026 academic year as Visiting Faculty in South Asian Studies and Jain Studies through the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at the Harvard Divinity School.  

Expertise:  

India, South Asia, ethnographic methods, anthropology of religion, Jainism, medical  anthropology, legal anthropology, feminist critical scholarship, (bio)ethics, biopolitics,  death and dying, palliative and hospice care, suicide, asceticism, gender, agency,  kinship 

Courses Offered:  

ASIAN 252: Contemporary Indian Society 

ASIAN 272: Animal Ethics in Asia 

ASIAN 300: Death and Dying in Asia 

ASIAN 303: Jainism: Religion & Culture of Nonviolence 

ASIAN 305: Anthropology of South Asia