The Department of Religious Studies will host Assistant Professor Anand Venkatkrishnan of The University of Chicago Divinity School for the annual Anjali Lecture Series.

Talk Description:

This talk introduces my next book project: a social history of classical South Asian studies in America. Instead of focusing on the primary sites of this field of knowledge (universities, diasporic institutions, and the white counterculture), this book reconstructs the lives, aspirations, and accomplishments of individuals on the margins of the field — specifically, women scholars, teachers, and artists who are not readily recognized as intellectual forebears. These women were often marginalized on account of race, gender, and other forms of ascriptive identity. Because these practices of disenfranchisement continue to operate in professional academic settings, writing about people who sought knowledge under circumstances of constraint contributes to thinking about the present and future of the field. Despite such constraints, the subjects of this book understood their study of the past as free and unmediated. Through intellectual biographies and personal narrative, I pursue the question of whether how you live matters to how you read.

Speaker Bio:

Anand Venkatkrishnan is an intellectual historian of South Asian religion. His first book, Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa in Indian Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), explores how popular religion shaped the everyday lives of Sanskrit scholars in early modern India. It shows that the vernacular-language, quotidian practices of bhakti reshaped writing in elite systems of Sanskrit learning. He is at work on two additional research projects. The first, Searching for Sarasvati, is a social and intimate history of classical South Asian studies in twentieth-century America. The other, Left-Hand Practice, concerns a group of loosely affiliated religious intellectuals in modern India involved with the political left.