Besides his current affiliation with LIAS and IIAS, he has served as the ICCR Chair of Contemporary India Studies at IIAS/ LIAS, Leiden University (2013-2018), Fellow at Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt (2018-2019); DAAD Professor at Heidelberg University (2019-20), and Guest Professor at Sichuan University, Chengdu(2015-2023). Before coming to Leiden, he was Professor and Chair, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was also a Fellow at Nehru memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi and Visiting Professor at Maison des Sciences De L’Homme, Paris.
Kanungo is the author of RSS’s Tryst with Politics: From Hedgewar to Sudarshan (2002) and co-edited Cultural Entrenchment of Hindutva: Local Mediations and Forms of Convergence (Routledge, 2011), Public Hinduisms(Sage, 2012),The Politics of Ethnicity in India, Nepal and China (Primus, 2014) and The Algebra of Warfare-Welfare: A Long View of India’s 2014 Election (Oxford, 2019). He was also the Principal Indian Investigator of Indian-European Social Sciences Research Networking Project on Electoral Changes in Urban and Rural India (2013-2016).
His research and publications cover the following areas:
Religion, Culture and Politics: Hindu Nationalism (ideology/everyday practice/mobilisation/ regional variations/ethnography at the grassroots); Religion and Urbanity: Religious Cities in India; Diaspora: Hinduism/Hindu Diaspora; Indian Politics: Electoral and Party Politics, State Politics; Indigenous Communities: Cultural and Political Mobilization; China’s Religious Landscape/Taoism and China-India Connection: Civilizational and Contemporary.