Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz

Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, USA. She is a feminist scholar of religion who specializes in women, gender, and religion, especially Hinduism, in South Asia. She has been doing research in Nepal since the late 1990s.

Her first book, Reciting the Goddess: Narratives of Place and the Making of Hinduism in Nepal (Oxford University Press, 2018), presents an archival and ethnographic study of Nepal’s local goddess Swasthani, the widely read Swasthani Vrata Katha, and the role both goddess and text have played in the construction of Nepali Hindu identity and practice. Reciting the Goddess earned the American Academy of Religion’s 2019 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (Textual Studies category). Her second book, The Swasthani Vrata Katha: A Secret Vow to the Goddess (Oxford University Press, 2025), is a co-authored translation, with Alaka Atreya Chudal, of the contemporary Swasthani Vrata Katha. This is the first ever scholarly English translation of the Swasthani from the original Nepali, which complements her translations of the earliest Swasthani texts from the Sanskrit and Newar languages. Her other Swasthani-related publications range in focus from a biography of the goddess and her iconography to the shift from Swasthani manuscript to print production to contemporary feminist critiques of the Swasthani and its complicated meaning for Nepali women and society today, among others.

More immediately, her newer work brings to the fore her broader interests in gender and religion in the context of Nepal’s understudied LGBTQ+ community. She is currently working on an ethnographic book project tentatively titled Queermandu: Intersections of Religion, Ethnicity, Caste, and Queerness in Nepal. The project builds on and moves beyond the limited scholarship on Nepal’s LGBTQ+ community, which focuses primarily on legal and human rights. Her work explores unaddressed aspects of daily lived realities and intersectional identities for LGBTQ+ Nepalis and LGBTQ+ activism in Nepal. She contributed an article titled “There Are No Hijras in Nepal” and Other Provocations: Rethinking Transgender and Queer Studies in Nepal” to a special issue on South Asia for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. She has also written about the role of religion in Nepal’s Pride parades for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.