Rethinking the Bhakti Movement | Prof. John Stratton Hawley

About the Speaker: John Stratton Hawley—informally, Jack—is Claire Tow Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. His most recent books on India’s bhakti traditions are A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard, 2015), Sur’s Ocean (with Kenneth Bryant, Harvard, 2015), a poem-by-poem commentary called Into Sur’s Ocean (Harvard Oriental Series, 2016), and Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century (Oxford, 2020). He is the co-editor of two recent volumes bearing on bhakti: Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India (Oxford, 2018) and Bhakti and Power: Debating India’s Religion of the Heart (University of Washington and Orient BlackSwan, 2019). A Storm of Songs received the A. K. Coomaraswamy Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 2017; Sur’s Ocean received the A. K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation of the Association for Asian Studies in 2018. Jack has received multiple awards from NEH, the Smithsonian, and the AIIS. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.