Wendy Doniger

Wendy Doniger
Born	1940 (age 83–84) New York, New York
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Harvard University Oxford University
Scientific career
Fields	History of Religions, Hinduism
Institutions	University of Chicago
Doctoral advisor	Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Sr.
Doctoral students	Over 100, among them: David Gordon White, Jeffrey Kripal, David Dean Shulman, Laurie Patton,

Wendy Doniger (O'Flaherty) (born in New York City, November 20, 1940) is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on Social Thought. She has taught at the University of Chicago since 1978. Much of her work is focused on translating, interpreting and comparing elements of Hinduism through modern contexts of gender, sexuality and identity.

Biography

She first trained as a dancer under George Balanchine and Martha Graham, and then went on to complete two doctorates in Sanskrit and Indian Studies. She has since been awarded six honorary doctorates. Doniger received her M.A. from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in June 1963. She next studied in India in 1963-64 with a 12-month Junior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies. She received her first Ph.D., in Sanskrit and Indian Studies, from Harvard University in June, 1968. She received a D. Phil. in Oriental Studies from Oxford University in February 1973, for which her dissertation was "The Origins of Heresy in Hindu Mythology."

Doniger has taught at Harvard, Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, the University of California at Berkeley, and, since 1978, at the University of Chicago, where she is at present the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, in the Divinity School, the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on Social Thought.

In 1984 she was elected President of the American Academy of Religion, in 1989 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1996 a Member of the American Philosophical Society, and in 1997 President of the Association for Asian Studies. She serves on the International Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 1986 she was awarded the Radcliffe Medal; in 1992 the Medal of the Collège de France; in June 2000, the PEN Oakland literary award for excellence in multi-cultural literature, non-fiction, for Splitting the Difference; and in October, 2002, the Rose Mary Crawshay prize from the British Academy, for the best book about English literature written by a woman, for The Bedtrick.

In 2004, she was invited to give the Stanford Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts. Her lecture was entitled, "Self-Imitation in Ancient India, Shakespeare, and Hollywood"

The Graham School of General Studies of the University of Chicago gave her the award for Excellence in Teaching in Graduate Studies, November 10, 2007, and the American Academy of Religion awarded her the 2008 Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion.

In addition to her Ph.D. from Harvard and her D. Phil. From Oxford, the 6 honorary Doctorates Doniger holds are: the Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Kalamazoo College, Michigan, January 18, 1985; the Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Bard College, May 25, 1996; the Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Washington and Lee University, June 5, 1997; the Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Northwestern University, June 18, 1999; the Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Lehigh University, May 18, 2009; and the Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Harvard University, June 4, 2009.

Doniger has served on History of Religions editorial board since 1979, and is also a member of International Journal of Hindu Studies Advisory Editorial Board, and has served in an official editorial capacity to: Journal of the American Academy of Religion (associate editor), 1977-82; Berkeley Religious Studies Series (advisory editor), 1979-83; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, publication series in religion (advisory editor), 1979-85; Delegate for history of religions, Oxford University Press, New York, 1984-1996; SUNY series on Kashmiri Saivism (advisory editor), 1983-88; Editorial Advisory Board, Asian Religious Studies Information Bibliography, SUNY Institute for the Advanced Study of World Religions, 1985-90; Editor of Hinduism Series, SUNY Press, 1989-; Corresponding Editor, South Asia Research, 1994-; and Editorial Board, Encyclopedia of Religion, second edition.

Doniger has lectured and taught on: "Indian mythology" at The Asia Society, New York; "Impermanence and eternity in Indian art and literature" to the Canvas of Culture Symposium at the Festival of India, Smithsonian Institution; Radhakrishnan Lectures, All Souls College, Oxford University, Trinity Term, May 1986; "Myths about Myths about Rituals", Inaugural lecture for the Mircea Eliade Professorship in History of Religions, University of Chicago; "Religious and non-religious arguments in the Laws of Manu," general lecture at the Sixteenth Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, Rome; and "Aspects of the Transmission of Knowledge in Ancient India”, Annual South Asia Lecture, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies.

Doniger has been on faculty at the University of Chicago for over 30 years. Representative of her numerous courses are: Hindu Mythology; Mythology in the Brahmanas; Translation of Religious Texts: the Rig Veda; The Mahabharata and the Odyssey; Readings in the Yogavasistha (in Sanskrit); Readings in the Puranas (in Sanskrit); The Ramayana (in Sanskrit); The Upanishads: Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya; Greek Tragedies: Prometheus Bound, Baccahe, Trachiniae, Alcestis; The Doctrine of Illusion and the Yogavasistha; The Odyssey; Plato's Timaeus; Classics in the Literature of Religion; The Iliad; Contemporary Issues in the Study of Religion; Myth and Law in Hinduism (Manu and Puranas); Authorship and Authority in Myth and Epic; Shakespeare's Black Comedies: Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida; The Kamasutra and the Laws of Manu [Sex and Religion in Ancient India]. This gives some idea of the breadth of her areas of expertise.

She has authored 16 books; translated (primarily from Sanskrit to English) with commentary 9 other volumes; provided text for and edited another dozen (all listed elsewhere on this Wikipedia page); and been the author of many hundreds of articles published in prestigious journals and popular magazines and newspapers too numerous to list but including New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Times of London, The Washington Post, U. S. News and World Report, International Herald Tribune, Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, Parabola, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Daedalus, Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of World Religions, New Encyclopaedia Britannica (Macropaedia), The Nation, Journal of Asian Studies, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Science, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the SUNY Series in Hinduism.

By 2004, Doniger was the author of 240 published articles.

Michael Witzel, professor of South Asian studies at Harvard, who has also been accused by Hindu nationalists of being anti-Hindu, has questioned her translations and her proclivity for finding sexual meanings in ancient texts. Nicolas Kazanas, a Greek Indologist, has stated that she seems to be obsessed with only one meaning of myths: the most sexual imaginable. At a public lecture in London, she once had an egg thrown at her. In 2003, in response to pressure from conservative Hindu political activists, Microsoft excised an article she wrote for the Encarta encyclopedia. Martha Nussbaum notes that "the tacit assumption behind the attacks on Doniger is that sex has something about it something shameful and nonrespectable, and that it is thus degrading to the Hindu gods to connect them with sex or to imput sexual doings to them." According to Nussbaum, Doniger "aims to show what is of deep human value in a tradition she loves." One leading antagonist behind the attacks on Doniger is Rajiv Malhotra, a very wealthy man from New Jersey, whose enterprise is "the discrediting of American scholars of Hinduism as sex-crazed defamers of sacred traditions."

In a book review on one of her books, The Hindus: An Alternative History, Pankaj Mishra, a columnist for the New York Times, writes that her chapter on the Mahabharata is particularly insightful, highlights the tragic aspects of the epic and unravels a cliche that Hindus are pacifist.

Works

Interpretive works

Published under the name of Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty:

• Served as Vedic consultant and co-author, and contributed a chapter ("Part II: The Post-Vedic History of the Soma Plant," pp. 95-147) in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, by R. Gordon Wasson (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968). 381 pp.
• Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva (Oxford University Press, 1973). 386 pp.
• The Ganges (London: Macdonald Educational, 1975).
• The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley: University of California, 1976). 411 pp.
• Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 382 pp.
• Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 ). 361 pp.
• Tales of Sex and Violence: Folklore, Sacrifice, and Danger in the Jaiminiya Brahmana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 145 pp.
• Other Peoples' Myths: The Cave of Echoes. (New York: Macmillan, 1988). 225 pp.

Published under the name of Wendy Doniger:

• The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth. The 1996-7 ACLS/AAR Lectures. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998; 200 pp.
• Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. The 1996 Jordan Lectures. Chicago and London: University of London Press and University of Chicago Press, 1999. 376 pp.

• Der Mann, der mit seiner eigenen Frau Ehebruch beging. Mit einem Kommentar von Lorraine Daston. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1999. 150 pp.
• The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 599 pp. Won the Rose Mary Crawshay prize from the British Academy for the best book about English literature written by a woman, 2002.
• La Trappola della Giumenta. Trans. Vincenzo Vergiani. Milan: Adelphi Edizione, 2003.
• The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 272 pp.
• The Hindus: An Alternative History. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. 789 pp.

Translations

Published under the name of Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty:

• Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook, translated from the Sanskrit. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1975; 357 pp.
• The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1981).
• (with David Grene) Antigone (Sophocles). A new translation for the Court Theatre, Chicago, production of February, 1983.
• Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism, in the series Textual Sources for the Study of Religion, edited by John R. Hinnells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 211 pp.
• (with David Grene). Oresteia. A New Translation for the Court Theatre Production of 1986. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 249 pp.

Published under the name of Wendy Doniger:

• Mythologies. A restructured translation of Yves Bonnefoy's Dictionnaire des Mythologies, prepared under the direction of Wendy Doniger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1991). 2 vols., c. 1,500 pp.
• The Laws of Manu. A new translation, with Brian K. Smith, of the Manavadharmasastra (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1991).
• Vātsyāyana Kāmasūtra. A new translation by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• The Lady of the Jewel Necklace and The Lady Who Shows Her Love. Harsha’s Priyadarsika and Ratnavali. Clay Sanskrit Series. New York: New York University Press, JJC Foundation, 2006.

Edited volumes

Under the name of Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty:

• The Concept of Duty in South Asia. Edited (with J. D. M. Derrett), with an introduction (pp. xiii-xix) and an essay ("The clash between relative and absolute duty: the dharma of demons," pp. 96-106) by W. D. O'Flaherty. (London: School of Oriental and African Studies). 240 pp.
• The Critical Study of Sacred Texts. Edited, with an introduction (pp. ix-xiii). (Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union, Religious Studies Series, 1979). 290 pp.
• Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions. Edited, with an introduction (pp. i-xv) and an essay ("Karma and rebirth in the Vedas and Puranas," pp. 1-39). (Berkeley: University of California Press; 1980). 340 pp. Reprinted, Banarsidass, 1999.
• The Cave of Siva at Elephanta. by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Carmel Berkson, and George Michell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
• Religion and Change. Edited by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty. History of Religions 25:4 (May, 1986).

Published under the name of Wendy Doniger:

• Animals in Four Worlds: Sculptures from India. Photographs by Stella Snead; text by Wendy Doniger (pp. 3-23) and George Michell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
• Purana Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts. Essays by David Shulman, V. Narayana Rao, A. K. Ramanujan, Friedhelm Hardy, John Cort, Padmanabh Jaini, Laurie Patton, and Wendy Doniger. Edited by Wendy Doniger. (SUNY Press, 1993). 331 pp.
• Off with Her Head! The Denial of Women's Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture. Ed., with Howard Eilberg-Schwartz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
• Myth and Method. Ed., with Laurie Patton. Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1996.

External links

• Doniger's homepage at the University of Chicago Divinity School website