Wendy Doniger
Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of
the History of Religions, University of Chicago
A leading authority in international religious studies for more than
thirty years, Wendy Doniger is one of the most eclectic scholars in the humanities today.
Topics as varied as death, dreams, evil, horses, sex, and women have attracted her
critical gaze, and her work has been termed "at once exactingly learned, strikingly
original, exuberantly humane, and refreshingly witty." Her principal teaching and
research interests are Hinduism and mythology, but she draws cannily for material
from everywhere, including Greek myths, the Hebrew Bible, medieval romance,
Shakespeare, and Hollywood. Doniger's writing first drew praise in 1973, for
Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva, and the twenty-something
books she has written since include Other People's Myths: The Cave of Echoes;
The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade; The Origins of Evil in Hindu
Mythology; The Rig Veda: An Anthology; and, most recently, The Woman Who
Pretended to Be Who She Was. She has taught at the University of Chicago
since 1978, where she is currently director of the Martin Marty Center, the
Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions,
and a member of the Committee on Social Thought. Doniger has not one doctorate,
but two, from Harvard and Oxford.
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