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The Lives of Indian Religions: A Symposium

Nov
8
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Humanities Quadrangle
320 York Street, New Haven CT, 06511
Room 276

Registration is required. Please register by Monday, November 4, 2024 (11/4/24).


Organized by Charlotte Gorant and Sonam Kachru

The Lives of Indian Religions celebrates the publication of Religions of Early India: A Cultural History and the career of its author, Richard H. Davis (see below).

In this ambitious, wide-ranging, and ground-breaking work, Richard H. Davis offers a new history of India’s myriad religious cultures that spans two thousand years, from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. Davis recounts this history of the religions we now know (such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism) and other, often unnamed religions that can be classified as “folk” or “popular” religions, through voices—voices recorded in hymns, poems, songs, didactic stories, epic narratives, scientific treatises, and theological discourses, as well as voices that speak through material remains, whether monumental sculptures or tiny terracotta figurines of nameless goddesses.

To celebrate the voices and visions of early India’s religions so carefully chronicled by Davis in this book and throughout his learned, generous, and scintillating career, to honor Davis’ own inimitable voice as well as the growing chorus of interest in South Asian Humanities at Yale University, this symposium brings together a mandala of his teachers, students, and colleagues to facilitate encounter, interaction, debate, critique, and mutual learning—the very values Davis prizes in the lives of the religions he studies and in the academic communities he has helped foster.

“Come and see,” as the Buddha liked to say!

 

Sponsored by Glorisun Global Network for Buddhist Studies, Bukkyou dentou kyoukai, Buddhist Studies Initiative, Yale MacMillan Center South Asian Studies Council, Yale MacMillan Center Council on East Asian Studies

About Richard H. Davis

Richard H. Davis is Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Bard College, Annandale on-Hudson, NY. Previously he taught at Yale University. He is author of four books:

  • Ritual in an Oscillating Universe: Worshiping Siva in Medieval India (Princeton University Press, 1991);
  • Lives of Indian Images (Princeton University Press, 1997; winner of the 1999 AAS Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize);
  • A Priest's Guide to the Great Festival: Aghorasiva's Mahotsavavidhi (Oxford University Press, 2009);
  • The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2014; Selected for WGBH News "Here are the books we read this year that we think you’ll love" 2014).

He has also edited two volumes: Images, Miracles, and Authority in Asian Religious Traditions (Westview Press, 1998); and Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India (Orient Longman, 2006).

Especially useful for students and scholars, as many will know, is his thoroughly researched (archivally sourced) history of South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, South Asia at Chicago, an indispensable guide to a consequential academic ecology: in his own words, it offers “a history of the origins of the Chicago South Asian program, the story of how a particular program came into being,” and through it, “the evolution of modern South Asian studies in America.”

Symposium Program

Friday, November 8th
8:00 - 8:30 AM
Breakfast
8:30 - 9:15 AM
Opening Remarks - Ron Inden (University of Chicago)
9:15 - 10:00 AM
Daud Ali (University of Pennsylvania)
10:00 - 10:30 AM
Tea Break
10:30 - 11:15 AM
Leslie Orr (Concordia University)
11:15 AM - 12:00 PM
Charlotte N. Gorant (Columbia University)
12:00 - 2:00 PM
Lunch
4:15 - 5:15 PM
Keynote by Richard Davis (Bard College) - "Bhagavan Manibhadra: What a Historian 'Has' and 'Has Not'"
5:15 PM
Dinner

Saturday, November 9th
8:00 - 8:30 AM
Breakfast
8:30 - 9:15 AM
John Cort (Denison College)
9:15 - 10:00 AM
Nabanjan Maitra (Bard College)
10:00 - 10:30 AM
Tea Break
10:30 - 11:15 AM
Subhashini Kaligotla (Columbia University)
11:15 AM - 12:00 PM
Charles Hallisey (Harvard University)
12:00 PM
Lunch
2:30 - 3:15 PM
Akira Shimada (SUNY New Paltz)
3:15 - 3:30 PM
Break
3:30 - 4:00 PM
Jack Hawley (Barnard College)
4:15 - 5:00 PM
Concluding Remarks - Richard Davis (Bard College)
5:30 PM
Harbour Room
Book Launch and Reception - Omni Hotel
  • Humanity