Khyati Tripathi is a psychologist and anthropologist from India, and approaches death studies from a multi-disciplinary lens spanning psychology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. Through her interdisciplinary approach, she delves into the intricate psychosocial significance and connections between events, emotions, and practices related to death. Her work thus frames larger discussions on palliative care, bereavement, and funerary and post-funerary rituals. She deals with death both at the level of the individual and larger mass trauma events, which has enabled her work on memory.
She is a Postdoctoral researcher with the End-of-Life Care Research Group at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and is working with Prof. Dr. Lara Pivodic on the ERC-funded project ‘TRAJECT,’ which aims to create a novel framework for identifying the end-of-life trajectories of older people with serious chronic illness.
In 2022, Khyati was selected as the Bajaj Visiting Research Fellow at the Mittal Institute, Harvard University. Currently, she is an Honorary Research Associate at the South Asia Institute, Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Death and Society (CDAS), University of Bath.
Khyati secured her B.A. (Honors) and M.A. degrees in Psychology and an M.Phil. degree in Anthropology from the University of Delhi. She completed her PhD from the Department of Psychology at the University of Delhi, India, and was awarded the Commonwealth scholarship funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) to pursue a split-site PhD in collaboration with the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her PhD project, psychosocial in its nature, focused on the cultural construction of the dead in Hinduism and Judaism through culture-specific death rituals and mortuary techniques.
