The Center for the Study of Hindu Traditions (CHiTra) at the University of Florida is hosting a series of four zoom talks on Consuming Bhakti: Dilemmas in Devotion in Indian Poetry. The series is cosponsored by the Department of Religion. The talks will be every Friday in May at 10:30 am Eastern Time. The same zoom link will work for all four talks.
To Register:
https://ufl.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAscemgrjgvEtLpaaUjJBmhYfL2RBNjFLpT
Friday, May 7, 2021, 10:30 am
“Translating the Regional, Negotiating Bhakti and Sainthood.”
Dr. Gil Ben-Herut is an Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department, University of South Florida. His research interests include pre-modern religious literature in the Kannada language, South Asian bhakti (devotional) traditions, translation in South Asia, and programming in Digital Humanities. His book Śiva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragaḷegaḷu (Oxford University Press) is the first study in English of the earliest Śaiva hagiographies in the Kannada-speaking region. The book received the Best First Book Award for 2019 from the Southeastern Medieval Association (SEMA) and the 2020 Best Book Award from the Southeastern Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (SEC/AAS). Ben-Herut is currently co-translating selections from this hagiographical collection for a separate publication. This project is funded by the American Academy of Religion’s Collaborative International Research Grant. Ben-Herut is the co-founder of the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network (RBSN), a platform for facilitating scholarly conversations about South-Asian devotional traditions, with annual events at national conferences, dedicated publications and special issues, as well as ongoing collaborations.
Friday, May 14, 2021, 10:30 am
“Critical Commensality as a Window into the Bhakti-Caste Question.”
Jon Keune is an Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at Michigan State University. His work focuses on religion, social history, and memory, especially the notion of equality. His recent monograph Shared Devotion, Shared Food: Equality and the Bhakti-Caste Question in Western India is being released by Oxford University Press at the end of April. He is working on translating the allegorical drama-poems (bharuds) of the 16th-century saint-poet Eknath, who drew on everyday life and marginalized social characters to convey his teachings. Beyond bhakti, Keune also studies transnational connections among Buddhists in India, Taiwan, and Japan, and he has interests in the role of comparison for studying religion, especially between the Indian and Chinese worlds.
Friday, May 21, 2021,10:30 am
“Bhakti Songs for the God on the Hill: The Legacy of Tallapaka Annamayya.”
Harshita Mruthinti Kamath is Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Assistant Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History at Emory University. Her research focuses on the textual and performance traditions of Telugu-speaking South India. Her monograph, Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance (University of California Press, 2019) analyzes gender impersonation in the Telugu dance style of Kuchipudi. She has also co-translated the sixteenth-century classical Telugu text Parijatapaharanamu (Theft of a Tree) with Velcheru Narayana Rao, which will be published as part of the Murty Classical Library of India (Harvard University Press). Her next project focuses on the fifteenth-century Telugu bhakti poet, Tallapaka Annamayya, in the context of the Tirumala-Tirupati temple.
Friday, May 28, 2021, 10:30 am
“Emotion and Devotion: The Rise of the Vernacular Revisited.”
Heidi Pauwels is professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her publications include two monographs on sixteenth-century Bhakti: Krishna’s Round Dance Reconsidered(Curzon, London 1996) and In Praise of Holy Men (Egbert Forsten, Groningen 2002), a book comparing classical Sanskrit, early modern Hindi and contemporary film and television retellings of the stories of Sita and Radha: The Goddess as Role Model (OUP, New York 2008), and two volumes on Kishangarh art and poetry: Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-century India (E.B. Verlag, Berlin 2015) and Mobilizing Krishna’s World (University of Washington Press, Seattle 2017). She is currently preparing a third volume: The Voice of India’s Mona Lisa. She has recently co-edited a special issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society on vernacular views on Aurangzeb (with Anne Murphy, 2018) and of South Asian History and Culture on fifteenth-century Gwalior (with Eva De Clercq, 2020).
