Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre at LUMS

I am an anthropologist focusing on questions of caste, religion, and the nation. My current research is a historical anthropological project on the relationship between caste, the Catholic Church, and the colonial state in Sri Lanka over the past two centuries. A further strand of this project aims, by drawing upon evidence and debates from across South Asia, to contribute to a renewal of the comparative study of caste alongside a reassessment of the influential Indian scholarship that has tended to dominate caste studies. Adjacent to these core topics, I am interested in linguistic questions that include language ideologies and second language acquisition, and I have recently published on the experience of learning Tamil through an anthropological lens. Before coming to LUMS I tutored on several anthropology courses at the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, and was also a casual lecturer at St Andrews. I completed my PhD in anthropology at University College London in 2020, following an MA in anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, also in London. Prior to that, I completed a BA in Russian and English at Trinity College Dublin.

COURSES TAUGHT

2024-2025

Spring semester

• Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (ANTH100)

• Introduction to Anthropology of Religion (ANTH268/REL252)

Fall Semester

• Caste in South Asia and Beyond (ANTH483/HIST4202)

2023-2024

Spring Semester

• Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (ANTH100)

• Caste in South Asia and Beyond (ANTH483/HIST4202)

Fall Semester

• Introduction to Anthropology of Religion (ANTH268)

PUBLICATIONS

1. Esler, Dominic (2024) Caste in Contemporary Sri Lanka. In Handbook on Contemporary Sri Lanka, edited by Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Amjad Mohamed Saleem. London: Routledge. Available here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003300991-38/caste-contemporary-sri-lanka-dominic-esler?context=ubx&refId=828e9b5e-30db-474c-ad78-d73d0dc38b0c 
2. Esler, Dominic (2021) Claiming the Mannar Martyrs: Catholicism and Caste in Northern Sri Lanka. In Multi-religiosity in Contemporary Sri Lanka: Innovation, Shared Spaces, Contestation, edited by Mark P. Whitaker, Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, and Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran, 233-245. London: Routledge.
3. Esler, Dominic (2019) Dealing with diglossia: Language learning as ethnography. In Learning and Using Languages in Ethnographic Research, edited by Julien Danero Iglesias, Robert Gibb, and Annabel Tremlett, 70-82. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
4. Esler, Dominic  (2018) Soviet Science Fiction of the 1920s: Explaining a Literary Genre in its Political and Social Context. In Russian Science Fiction of Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader, edited by Anindita Banerjee, 117-146. Boston: Academic Studies Press. (Republication.)
5. Esler, Dominic (2010) Soviet Science Fiction of the 1920s: Explaining a Literary Genre in its Political and Social Context. Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 109, 27-52.