Dipesh_Chakrabarty

Dipesh Chakrabarty
Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago

Bio: Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is also a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, an associate faculty of the Department of English, holds a visiting professorial fellowship at the Research School of Humanities at the Australian National University, and an honorary professorial fellowship with the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a co-editor of Critical Inquiry, and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies. He is a contributing editor to Public Culture, and has served on the editorial board of the American Historical Review. He was one of the founding editors (along with Sheldon Pollock from Columbia University and Sanjay Subrahmanyam from UCLA) of the series South Asia Across the Disciplines published by a consortium of three university presses (Chicago, Columbia, and California). He also serves on the Board of Experts for the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.

He is currently engaged in completing two books to be published by the University of Chicago Press. They are provisionally entitled The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth and The Climate of History: Four Theses. The Duke University Press is publishing a collection of his essays, entitled History and the Time of the Present. His other publications include Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940 (Princeton: 1989, 2000); Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000; second edition, 2007); Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2002); He has also edited (with Shahid Amin) Subaltern Studies IX (Delhi: OUP, 1996), (with Carol Breckenridge, Homi Bhabha, and Sheldon Pollock) Cosmopolitanism (Duke, 2000); (with Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori) From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Delhi: OUP, 2007), and (with Bain Attwood and Claudio Lomnitz) “The Public Life of History,” a special issue of Public Culture (2008). Provincializing Europe has been translated into Italian, French, Polish, and Spanish and is being brought out in Turkish, Korean, and Chinese. Habitations has been published in Arabic. A collection of two essays translated into Spanish was published in 2009: El humanismo en la era de la globalizacion and La descolonizacion y las politicas culturales (Buenos Aires: Katz Editores, and Barcelona: Centro de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona, 2009). A Dipesh Chakrabarty Reader (in Chinese) was recently published from Shanghai (Nanfang Press, 2010). An assortment of essays was published in German under the title, Europa als Provinz: Perspektiven postkolonialer Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2010). A collection of essays written originally in Bengali was recently brought out in Calcutta, Itihasher janajibon o anyanyo probondho (The Public Life of History and Other Essays) (in Bengali) (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2011)


Diana Eck

Diana L. Eck
Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies and Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Member of the Faculty of Divinity, Harvard University

Bio: Diana Eck's academic work has a dual focus—India and America. Her work on India focuses on popular religion, especially temples and places of pilgrimage, called tirthas. Her books include Banaras: City of Light and Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India and her most recent work, India: A Sacred Geography, published in 2012.

Her work on the United States focuses especially on the challenges of religious pluralism in a multireligious society. Since 1991, she has headed the Pluralism Project, which explores and interprets the religious dimensions of America's new immigration; the growth of Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, and Zoroastrian communities in the United States; and the new issues of religious pluralism and American civil society. The Pluralism Project's award-winning CD-ROM, On Common Ground: World Religions in America, was published in 1997; her book A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation was published in 2001. Her book Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey From Bozeman to Banaras is in the area of Christian theology and interfaith dialogue. It won the Grawemeyer Book Award in 1995, and a 10th-anniversary edition was published in 2003.

Eck received the National Humanities Award from President Clinton and the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1998, the Montana Governor's Humanities Award in 2003, and the Melcher Lifetime Achievement Award from the Unitarian Universalist Association in 2003. In 2005-06 she served as president of the American Academy of Religion. Eck has worked closely with churches on issues of interreligious relations, including her own United Methodist Church and the World Council of Churches. She is currently chair of the Interfaith Relations Commission of the National Council of Churches. In 2009 Eck delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, a series of six lectures titled "The Age of Pluralism."


Brian Hatcher

Brian Hatcher
Professor and Packard Chair of Theology and Chair, Department of Religion at Tufts University

Bio: Brian Hatcher is a scholar of the Hindu tradition in colonial and contemporary India. His research interests include the transformation of intellectual and social life in colonial Bengal, the interrogation of modernity under the conditions of colonialism, and the expression of religious change among emergent Hindu movements. He is particularly interested in recovering the agency of Indian intellectuals in shaping such processes, either in conformity with or resistance to the normative ideologies and institutions of British colonialism. In his published work he has explored such topics as the dynamics of modern Hindu eclecticism; "bourgeois Hinduism" in nineteenth-century Calcutta; and the fate of Sanskrit learning in colonial India. His most recent monograph, Vidyasagar: The Life and After-life of an Eminent Indian (2014) addresses the challenge of understanding the identity of an influential Sanskrit scholar and social reformer against a shifting backdrop of autobiography, biography, memory, controversy and nationalist aspiration. This new book supplements his earlier study of Vidyasagar, Idioms of Improvement (1996), while offering a useful companion to his recent annotated translation of Vidyasagar's Hindu Widow Marriage (2011).


Swami tyagananda

Swami Tyagananda
Head of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society, Boston. Chaplain at MIT, Harvard

Bio: Swami Tyagananda, a monk of the Ramakrishna Order since 1976, is the head of the Vedanta Society in Boston, and is the Hindu Chaplain at Harvard and MIT. Prior to coming to the United States, Swami Tyagananda was for eleven years the editor of the English language journal Vedanta Kesari based in Chennai, India. He has written, translated and edited ten books, including Monasticism: Ideals and Traditions (1991), Values: The Key to a Meaningful Life (1996) and The Essence of the Gita (2000), Interpreting Ramakrishna (2011), and his latest book, Walking the Walk: A Manual of Karma Yoga (2013). Swami Tyagananda has presented papers at academic conferences and he gives lectures and classes at the Vedanta Society as well as at MIT, Harvard and, on invitation, other colleges and religious groups in North America.


Swami Prasannatmananda

Swami Prasannatmananda
Assistant Swami, Ramakrishna Order of India, Berkeley Vedanta Society

Bio: Swami Prasannatmananda is a fully ordained monk and an active minister of the Ramakrishna Order of India. He received his monastic ordination in 1995 after extensive spiritual practice and scriptural training. In 2011, Swami Prasannatmananda was posted at the Vedanta Society of Berkeley, California, where he has been continuing his service as an Assistant Swami. His decades of ministerial service includes spiritual practice and worship, personal counseling, congregational prayer, scriptural and philosophical studies and research. He offers classes and formal lectures on a variety of useful topics at various educational institutions, some of which have been at UC Berkeley and Stanford. He has participated in numerous conferences and interfaith seminars and given several radio and TV interviews on various channels like: The Yoga Hour of Unity - on line Radio, Stanford 90.1 FM radio, and IND TV. He has also written several philosophical and religious articles, such as ‘Swami Vivekananda’s Views on Buddhist Monasticism’, ‘Role of Spirituality in Health’ and ‘The Great Women in Hindu Scriptures and Holy Mother.’ Swami welcomes one-on-one meetings, interviews or group sessions with prior appointment..


Lawrence Cohen

Lawrence Cohen
Professor of Anthropology and South & Southeast Asia Studies, Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies, and Chair of the Center for South Asia Studies

Bio: Lawrence Cohen is Professor of Anthropology and South & Southeast Asia Studies, Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies, and Chair of the Center for South Asia Studies. His primary field is the critical study of medicine, health, and the body. His early work examined debates over old age and the moral condition of the elderly in 19th and 20th century India, with a focus on medicine. That work led to the books No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things and the edited collection Thinking about Dementia.  His subsequent research, again based in north India, focused on contemporary Ayurveda, on popular cinema, on AIDS and the remaking of sexuality, and on the relations between sex, gender, politics, and ideas of "backwardness."  He went on to write extensively on the politics and regulation of kidney transplantation in India. Professor Cohen's current research is on biometric governance: specifically on the Unique Identification Authority of India,  its "Aadhaar" card, and the contested promise of reorganizing welfare, banking, and the life of the poor through the "de-duplication" of India itself.