Birks Lecture Series: Kudiyattam: The Last Living Sanskrit Theater
David Shulman is regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on theÌýlanguages and literatures of India. He received his Ph.D. in 1976 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, in Tamil literature.ÌýHis research embraces many fields, including theÌýhistory of religionÌýinÌýSouth India, IndianÌýpoetics,ÌýTamilÌýIslam,ÌýDravidian linguistics, andÌýKarnatak music. He is also a publishedÌýpoetÌýinÌýHebrew, aÌýliterary critic, aÌýcultural anthropologist, and aÌýpeace activist. He was formerly ProfessorÌýofÌýIndian StudiesÌýandÌýComparative ReligionÌýat TheÌýHebrew University, Jerusalem, and professor in the Department of Indian,ÌýIranianÌýandÌýArmenianÌýStudies, and now holds an appointment asÌýRenee Lang Professor ofÌýHumanistic StudiesÌýat theÌýHebrew UniversityÌýin Jerusalem. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on various subjects ranging fromÌýtempleÌýmythsÌýand temple poems to essays that cover a wide spectrum of the cultural history of South India. Among these are the monographs Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition (Princeton, 1980); The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry (Princeton, 1985); The Hungry God: Hindu Tales of Filicide and Devotion (Chicago, 1993); and More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India (Harvard, 2012); and the co-authored works, with Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam Symbols of Substance (Oxford, 1993); and Textures of Time: Writing History in South India (2002).
Bilingual in Hebrew and English, he works inÌýSanskrit,ÌýHindi,ÌýTamil, Telugu, and Malayalam and readsÌýGreek,ÌýRussian,ÌýFrench,ÌýGerman,ÌýPersian,Ìýand Arabic. He has a passion for classical Karnatak (South Indian) music, though he has also studied Hindustani (North Indian) Dhrupad singing.
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