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.