The 2014 Lindesmith Lecturer is Professor Wendy Doniger. She will speak on “Freedom of Speech in India, from the Vedas to the Present”.
Professor Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions; she is also in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Committee on Social Thought, and the University of Chicago, Divinity School. Doniger has been named the 2015 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecturer by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). (Named for the first chairman of ACLS, the Haskins Prize Lecture series is entitled “A Life of Learning” and celebrates scholarly careers of distinctive importance.)
There will be a dinner following the talk for invited faculty and guests only beginning at 7:30pm.
Wendy Doniger earned her MA and PhD from Harvard University and her Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford University. Her research and teaching interests revolve around two basic areas, Hinduism and mythology. Her courses in mythology address themes in cross-cultural expanses, such as death, dreams, evil, horses, sex, and women; her courses in Hinduism cover a broad spectrum that, in addition to mythology, considers literature, law, gender, and zoology.
Among over thirty books published under the names of Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty and Wendy Doniger are seventeen interpretive works, including Siva: The Erotic Ascetic; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities; Tales of Sex and Violence: Folkore, Sacrifice, and Danger in the Jaiminiya Brahmana; Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes; Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India; The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade; The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth; The Woman Who Pretended To Be Who She Was; The Hindus: An Alternative History; and On Hinduism. For more information on her remarkable work, please click here.
For more information, please contact Kristin Bloomer (kbloomer@carleton.edu) or Sandy Saari (ssaari@carleton.edu).