Eileen is a Ph.D candidate in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara who teaches courses at UCSB and for the University of Houston. She specializes in the 16th century Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition and the siddha-rūpa, the perfected and eternally gendered devotional body that practitioners are theorized to initially experience in meditation and ultimately experience in liberation.

Eileen is a comparative scholar who works across Indic traditions, and her dissertation compares the soteriological framework of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition to those of the Pātañjala Yoga, Advaita Vedānta, Śrīvaiṣṇava Sampradāya, and Pāñcarātra ritual tradition. She analyzes the contending frameworks of embodiment and embodied transformation that these traditions employ with respect to the practices of: (1) meditation and visualization, (2) adopting particular affective or emotional states, (3) performing actions and/or rituals for psychophysical purification, and (4) cultivating specific types of positive desire (rāga).

Eileen’s research interests include Comparative Indian Philosophy, bhakti, Sanskrit Aesthetic Theory (rasa), and Gender and Sexuality.

Eileen completed her M.A. in Religion at Rutgers University and B.A. in Philosophy at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ​

She is a former yoga teacher, jewelry designer and theatrical lighting designer from New York City.

You can contact Eileen at eileengoddard@ucsb.edu.

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