The professor of Religious Studies also offered a seminar in research methodologies for graduate students.
Amy Allocco, professor of religious studies and director of Ƶ’s Multifaith Scholars program, presented the keynote for the 6th annual Religion Graduate Students Association Symposium (RGSA) held at the University of Florida, March 27-28, 2026. Allocco’s lecture, “‘A God Feeling in Every Heart’: Strategic Innovation Among South India’s Hindu Drummer-Priests,” opened the conference on Friday evening.
Vasudha Narayanan, distinguished professor in the University of Florida’s Department of Religion, introduced Allocco’s keynote. Allocco focused her lecture on pampaikkārar, musicians who play the twin-headed set of drums known as pampai and sing to invoke the deities in diverse Hindu devotional contexts. Drawing on material from her recently completed sabbatical fieldwork project in Tamil-speaking South India, she highlighted the role of pampaikkārar as both musicians and ritual specialists who invoke deities through sound. She argued that these practitioners innovatively adapt their performances in response to changing aesthetic preferences, devotional needs and social contexts while both maintaining credibility and inspiring the “god-feeling” referenced in the title of her presentation. Allocco also reflected on her own research methods, emphasizing how fieldwork relationships as well as lived traditions shape scholarly questions and, by extension, outcomes.
Following her address, Allocco met with graduate students for an hour-long seminar on methodologies for the study of religion, where emerging researchers had the opportunity to ask questions about ethnography and research ethics as well as their own projects. Participants read two of Allocco’s journal articles, which had been selected by conference organizers as the starting point for this seminar.
On Saturday morning, Allocco delivered welcome remarks to inaugurate the full day of paper sessions. The symposium was sponsored by the University of Florida’s Department of Religion with support from its Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.