Tori Gross is Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Anthropology at the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences. Broadly, her interests include the politics of affect and emotion, performative hierarchy and masculinity, and articulations of parastate sovereignty in postcolonial contexts. Grounded in ethnographic and archival research in Tamil Nadu, her research currently focuses on caste-based political movements that elucidate generative tensions between community and nation-state, and between yearning for the glories of the imagined past and living with the disenchanting realities of the present.