Luke Whitmore is a Professor of Religious Studies in the Philosophy and Religious Studies department of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where he has been teaching for 14 years. He earned a B.A. in Classics from Haverford College in 1995, received his M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School in 1999 and his Ph.D. in West and South Asian Religions from the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University in 2010. He also studied for 2 years at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem.
 His book Mountain, Water, Rock, God: Understanding Kedarnath in the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2018), examines how people have experienced the Himalayan Hindu shrine of Kedarnath (sacred to the god Shiva) before and after disastrous glacial lake outburst floods in 2013. His current research focuses on how local forms of ritual practice serve as windows into broader patterns of change in the central Indian Himalaya that are driven by the combined influence of Hindu religious tourism and climate-warming related environmental changes.
