About the Authors
- About the Authors
Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger is a professor of South Asian religions, ethnography of religion, and performance studies in the Department of Religion at Emory University. Her current project, “Material Acts: The Agency of Materiality in India,” is supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim and Summer National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the author of Everyday Hinduism (2015), When the World Becomes Female: Possibilities of a South Indian Goddess (2013), In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender & Vernacular Islam in South India (2006), and Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India (1996). She is also a co-editor of and contributor to Oral Epics in India (1989) and Boundaries of the Text: Epic Performances in South and Southeast Asia (1991).
Peter Friedlander has been Senior Lecturer in Hindi-Urdu at the Australian National University since 2012. He was previously Hindi lecturer at La Trobe University Melbourne and Senior Hindi lecturer at the National University of Singapore. He studied in Varanasi from 1977 to 1982 and at London University from 1983 to 1991. His Ph.D. dissertation examined the medieval Indian poet saint Raidās “The Life and Works of Sant Raidās” (1991). His research interests include studies of Indian religious traditions and the relationship between religion and politics. His recent publications include: “The Theory and Practice of the Mandala: Ritual and Identity in the Kabīr Panth” in Asian Horizons; The Treasury of Devotion: Sant Charandas's Bhaktipadarth (2014); “Muni Ratnacandra’s Nine Jain Questions for Christians,” International Journal of Jaina Studies; and “Kabīr and the Print Sphere,” Thesis Eleven.
Ann Grodzins Gold is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, New York. Her current book project, “Shiptown: North Indian Passages between Rural and Urban,” is supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Humanities Center. Her publications include: Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims (1988); A Carnival of Parting: The Tales of King Bharthari and King Gopi Chand (1992); Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (1994, co-authored with Gloria Raheja); and In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power, and Memory in Rajasthan (2002, co-authored with Bhoju Ram Gujar).
Kirin Narayan is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies in the School of Culture, History, and Language of the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Her interests in oral traditions, religion, gender, creativity, and ethnographic writing reflect a concern with the social life of narratives. She is the author of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (1989); Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (1997) in collaboration with Urmila Devi Sood, a Kangra storyteller; Love Stars and All That (1994), a novel and academic comedy; My Family and Other Saints (2007), a memoir of cross-cultural spiritual quests; and Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012). She is also co-editor of Creativity/Anthropology (1993) and editor, with a new introduction, of a reissue of a pioneering nineteenth-century collection of Indian folktales, Mary Frere’s Old Deccan Days (2002). She is currently working on a book about everyday creativity and Kangra women’s songs.
Leela Prasad is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Her interests are in the lived, expressive dimensions of ethics in Hindu and other Indic contexts through narrative, media, performance, and art. Her first book is Poetics of Conduct: Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town (2007). She is currently at work on a second book about folktale collections made by Indian authors in colonial India that reappraises “enchantment” as a critical mode of engaging history and forms of political critique, as well as co-directing an ethnographic documentary film, “Moved by Gandhi.”
Mahesh Sharma is Professor of History at Panjab University Chandigarh, and ICCR-India Chair Professor at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of The Realm of Faith: Subversion, Appropriation, and Dominance in the Western Himalaya (2001); Western Himalayan Temple Records: State, Pilgrimage, Ritual, and Legality in Chambā (2009); and co-editor...
