from the University of Chicago in 1967 with the thesis titled "'Fate' and the Gods in the Panjabi Cult of Gugga: A Structural Semantic Analysis".
[9] Her research interests also includes the study of the effects of the "socioeconomic change" on the female populace of northern India's countryside areas.
[5] Rutgers University's Michael Moffatt notes that Wadley is one of the few anthropologists who write monographs on the villages of India.
Later, her research was funded by the entities like the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, and the United States Department of Education.
[12] Wadley wrote Raja Nal and the Goddess: The North Indian Epic Dhola in Performance (2004) after over 3 decades of "researching and recording" Dhola, an oral epic which is performed in northwestern and northern regions of India and has some goddesses, women and a king named Nal as its heroes.
Sadhana Naithani of the Jawaharlal Nehru University noted that Wadley conducted her research on the epic at a time when it is dying out.
[16] Archana Shukla of the University of Delhi stated that Wadley provided "primary and secondary data" and inquired into and compared "the realms of oral and written folk traditions".
[15] According to Fabrizio M. Ferrari, Wadley individuated "major issues in the dramatic representation of local epics and their relation with the written Sanskrit tradition".