Puja, Poetry and Performance: Enduring Bhakti Traditions in the Indian Subcontinent

Archana Venkatesan

Archana Venkatesan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests are in the intersection of text, image and performance in South India. Her books include The Secret Garland: Āṇṭāḷ’s Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoḻi (2010), A Hundred Measures of Time: Nammāḻvār’s Tiruviruttam (2014), Endless Song: Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi (2020), and with Crispin Branfoot, In Andal’s Garden: Art, Ornament and Devotion in Srivilliputtur (2015). She is currently working on a project on nine interconnected Viṣṇu temples in Tamil Nadu known as the Nava Tirupati.

Indira Peterson

Indira Peterson is Professor of Asian Studies, Emerita, Mount Holyoke College, U.S.A. She has a B.A. (English Literature) from Bombay University, and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard University. Among Dr. Peterson's major publications are: Poems to Śiva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints (Princeton 1989), and Arjuna and the Hunter (Murty Classical Library of India, Harvard University Press, 2016), a translation of Bhāravi’s Sanskrit poem Kirātārjunīya. She has also co-authored with George Michell, The Great Temple at Thanjavur: A Thousand Years. 1010 – 2010 (Mumbai, 2010). Dr. Peterson is presently an American Institute of Indian, and National Endowment for the Humanities Research Senior Fellow at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, conducting research on Marathi dramas at the 18th-century Thanjavur Maratha court.

Richard Davis

Richard H. Davis is Research Professor of Religion and Asian Studies Programs at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he taught from 1997 to 2022. Previously he taught as assistant and associate professor in the Religious Studies Department at Yale University, 1987-1997. During that time he was also involved in helping establish the Committee on South Asian Studies of the YCIAS. He received a BA from the University of Chicago, an MA from the University of Toronto, and his PhD in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 1986.
His primary research interest is in the long-term history of Hindu religious traditions. His most recent publication is The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2014), which traces this important Hindu text over two millennia of its reception history. He is author of four other books: Ritual in an Oscillating Universe: Worshiping Siva in Medieval India (Princeton, 1991), Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, 1997, winner of the 1999 A.K. Coomaraswamy Award), Global India, circa 100 CE: South Asia in Early World History (AAS, 2010), and A Priest's Guide for the Great Festival (Oxford, 2010). He has edited two volumes, and also wrote the text for a catalog of Indian religious prints, Gods in Print: Masterpieces of India’s Mythological Art (Mandala, 2012). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship.
He is currently completing work on a book-length history of religions in early South Asia. This narrative history explores the origins and early development of the multiple religions that found their place in the Indian landscape in ancient and classical times: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and other less-known religions. The time range in this text runs from the earliest archeological evidence of religious practices in the subcontinent up to the period around 650 CE, a point of transition from “classical” or “late antiquity” to “early medieval” historical periods. His lectures at Jnanapravaha will be based on this current work-in-progress.

Vasudha Narayanan

Vasudha Narayanan is Distinguished Professor, Department of Religion, and Director, Center for the study of Hindu Traditions (CHiTra) at the University of Florida. She is a past President of the American Academy of Religion (2001-2002) and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. Vasudha Narayanan was educated at the Universities of Madras and Bombay in India, and at Harvard University. She is currently working on Hindu temples and traditions in Cambodia. She is the author or editor of nine books and numerous articles, chapters in books, and encyclopedia entries. In addition, she is also the associate editor of the seven-volume Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from several organizations including the Centre for Khmer Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies/ Smithsonian, and the Social Science Research Council.