Affiliated Faculty

<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh is the Crawford Family Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she has taught since 1986. One of the foremost authorities on Sikhism in the global academy, she has spent nearly four decades advancing the study of Sikh sacred poetry, feminist theology, and visual art — publishing 14 books and more than 100 articles and book chapters that have reshaped how scholars and general readers alike encounter the Sikh intellectual tradition.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Born in Patiala, Punjab, Singh grew up in an environment steeped in Sikh scholarship. Her father, Professor Harbans Singh, chaired the religious studies department at Punjabi University and served as the editor of the <em>Encyclopaedia of Sikhism</em>. She came to the United States as a teenager to attend Stuart Hall, a preparatory school in Virginia, where an encounter with Walt Whitman's "A Passage to India" deepened her connection to her Sikh roots and set the course of her scholarly life. She earned her B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from Wellesley College (1978), her M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania (1982), and her Ph.D. from Temple University (1987).</p>   <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Singh's scholarship is distinguished by its integration of literary analysis, feminist critique, and deep engagement with primary sources in Gurmukhi. Her first book, <em>The Feminine Principle in the Sikh Vision of the Transcendent</em>(Cambridge University Press, 1993), opened groundbreaking pathways for feminist approaches to Sikh scripture, recovering the holistic presence of the feminine in Sikh conceptions of the Divine. <em>The Birth of the Khalsa: A Feminist Re-Memory of Sikh Identity</em> (SUNY Press, 2005) continued this trajectory, challenging patriarchal readings of Sikh history and identity formation. Scholars have described these works as "flinging open wide the doors to feminist approaches" within the field.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Her translation work has been equally transformative. <em>The Name of My Beloved: Verses of the Sikh Gurus</em>(HarperCollins, 1995; Penguin, 2001) was the first contemporary English translation of hymns from both the Guru Granth Sahib and the Dasam Granth. Most recently, <em>Poems from the Sikh Sacred Tradition</em> (Harvard University Press, Murty Classical Library of India, 2023) offers a landmark new translation of Guru Nanak's verses that prioritizes the elemental simplicity, gender inclusivity, and sensuous immediacy of the original Punjabi — deliberately departing from the colonial and Biblical diction that has historically marked English renderings of Gurbani. The volume has been praised as "a landmark volume, filled with beautiful renderings of writings from the Guru Granth Sahib."</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Singh has also made significant contributions to Sikh visual culture. <em>Janamsakhi: Paintings of Guru Nanak in Early Sikh Art</em> (Roli Books, 2023) presents 57 iconotexts from the B-40 Janamsakhi manuscript (dated 1733, held at the British Library), pairing Alam Chand Raj's paintings with Singh's 21st-century interpretations that foreground Guru Nanak's progressive vision on gender, interfaith reciprocity, and embodied spirituality. Her other major works include <em>Sikhism: An Introduction</em> (2011), <em>Of Sacred and Secular Desire: An Anthology of Lyrical Writings from the Punjab</em>(2012), <em>The First Sikh: The Life and Legacy of Guru Nanak</em> (Penguin, 2019), and <em>Cosmic Symphony: The Early and Later Poems of Bhai Vir Singh</em> (Sahitya Akademi, 2008). Her co-authored <em>Sikhism: The Basics</em> (Routledge, 2025) provides an accessible, gender-inclusive introduction to the tradition.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Singh serves on the editorial boards of the <em>History of Religions</em>, the <em>Journal of the American Academy of Religion</em>, and <em>Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory</em>. She is a trustee of the American Institute for Indian Studies and has been awarded a fellowship by the Department of Historical Studies at Punjabi University, Patiala. In 2022, the city of Fresno, California, designated March 26 as "Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh Day" in recognition of her distinguished contributions to Sikh scholarship. She has lectured extensively across North America, England, France, India, and Singapore, with her work featured on television and radio in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Bangladesh, and India.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">At the core of Singh's work is a conviction that Guru Nanak was a radical feminist and pluralist whose sacred poetry holds transformative relevance for contemporary challenges of equality, environmental ethics, and interfaith understanding. Her scholarship demonstrates that rigorous engagement with Sikh primary sources — in their original language, poetic form, and aesthetic register — is essential to unlocking the tradition's full intellectual and spiritual power.</p>