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April 25, 2005
Wendy Doniger - Yay!
It's nice when someone is invited to speak at These Colleges whose field of interest is something in the seriously past past. It doesn't happen very often, I hate to say. Our president was a Clinton White House employee who because Peace Corps Director, so all the participants in his sponsored lecture series are inside-the-Beltway folk. I mean, Dee Dee Myers is giving the talk at graduation. Dee Dee Myers? Then there's the almost-annually awarded Elizabeth Blackwell award. So far no winners are interested in anyone dead. There was an historian named Hanna Holborn Gray who was awarded the prize in 1984, but she got it for being the first woman president of a major American university (the University of Chicago) rather than for being a Ren-Ref specialist (I'll put it this way -- we gave her the award, but our library owns none of her books; Cornell's library owns 2, both of which are about contemporary American education, and JSTOR doesn't turn up much more; like many educational administrators she seems to be better known as an administrator than an educator). The best-advertised ongoing lecture series is all about the modern world. Our Genocide series gets further into the past than almost anything else, though there still hasn't been a speaker who talked about a genocide as early as the Armenians; given the local depopulation story I'm a little surprised not to see a speaker on Native American things in the list. It's not that there's never a lecture on the world before 1800, but that it's seldom in a forum widely advertised and particularly well-attended.
Well, this afternoon we had someone relevant AND talking about Sanskrit! What more could I ask? She was splendid, funny, and in the thick of para-academic controversy.
Prof. Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, wheeled across 3000 years of literature and movies -- from Sanskrit tales to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and dropped lines like "well of course I read French, I'm an adult." I hope our students were impressed; I certainly was.
She also has had an egg thrown at her during a lecture at the University of London for having written about Hinduism from the outside. She's a bête noire for certain folks who want only Hindus to talk about Hinduism, which was the point of discussion in the afternoon seminar.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at April 25, 2005 8:10 PM