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Research Project

Entanglements of the Indian Past

Project Team:

2021 – 2025
Hemachandra, Leaf from a Jain manuscript, 13th century
Hemachandra, Leaf from a Jain manuscript, 13th century. Cleveland Museum of Art collection, purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Key Question

Project Summary

A series of interdisciplinary workshops focused on key themes and pivotal moments that shaped the course of Indian historiography will help chart a future course for the study of the Indian past.

Topics

Research Team

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College

University of Chicago

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s research interests are in modern South Asian history and historiography, in postcolonial theory and its impact on history-writing, and in comparative studies of questions and politics of modernity. He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a ...
Full Bio

John E. Cort

John E. Cort

Professor Emeritus of Religion

Denison University

John E. Cort is the author of Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India (2001), Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in India (2010), and, with Lawrence A. Babb and Michael W. Meister, Desert Temples: Sacred Centers of Rajasthan in Historical, Art-Historical and Social ...
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Whitney Cox

Whitney Cox

Associate Professor, South Asian Languages and Civilizations

University of Chicago

Whitney Cox’s main interests are in the literary and intellectual history of southern India in the early second millennium CE. Within that broad range, his research has concentrated on Sanskrit kāvya and poetic theory, the history of the Śaiva religion, and medieval Tamil literature and epigraphy, ...
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Lynna Dhanani

Lynna Dhanani

Lynna Dhanani

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

University of California, Davis

Lynna Dhanani's research explores the confluence of interreligious polemics, philosophical debate, devotional themes, and poetics in the Sanskrit hymns of the celebrated twelfth-century Svetambara Jain Hemacandra, court pandit to two Hindu kings of medieval Gujarat. Having dedicated herself to the ...
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Charu Gupta

Charu Gupta

Charu Gupta

Professor of History

University of Delhi

Charu Gupta is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delhi. The focus of her work is gender, sexuality, masculinity, caste, religious identities, and vernacular literatures in early twentieth-century north India. Her publications include Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: ...
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Doug Ober

Doug Ober

Sessional Lecturer, Department of History and Research Associate, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs

University of British Columbia

Doug Ober is a historian of South Asia, religion, and colonialism with more than a decade of archival and ethnographic research experience in northern India, the Himalayas (India, Nepal, Bhutan) and Tibetan areas of China. His research explores how colonialism shaped and continues to shape social, ...
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Andrew Ollett

Andrew Ollett

Neubauer Family Assistant Professor, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations

University of Chicago

Andrew Ollett studies the literary and intellectual traditions of South Asia, including works composed in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, and Kannada, mostly falling within the first millennium of the common era. Ollett's research has focused on the “question of language”: the availability and ...
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Sarah Pierce Taylor

Sarah Pierce Taylor

Assistant Professor of Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture

University of Chicago

Sarah Pierce Taylor’s research focuses on gender and emotion in premodern religion in South India. Her current book project, Embodying Souls: Emotion, Gender, and Animality in Premodern South Asian Religion, considers the soteriological tension in Jainism between experiencing and escaping the ...
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Anand Venkatkrishnan

Anand Venkatkrishnan

Assistant Professor, Divinity School and the College

University of Chicago

Anand Venkatkrishnan is an intellectual historian of religion in South Asia. His book in progress, Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa in Indian Intellectual History, examines the relationship of bhakti, religion as lived affect, with philosophy as intellectual practice. It shows ...
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