The Department of Asian Studies presents:
Ritual Culture in Early India: The 2013 Junior-Senior Scholarly Symposium in Sanskrit Studies
The series is designed to bring one junior scholar and one senior scholar specializing in Sanskrit Studies to campus at the same time to engage both with each others’ work and with our undergraduate and graduate students interested in premodern South Asian history, language, and culture. Please join us this coming week for two scholarly talks engaging in the cultural role of ritual in constructing intellectual, religious, and social reality in early India.
Thursday, April 4, 2013:
Marko Geslani, Occidental College
“Omens in the Fire: the Ritual Formation of Astrological Vedism”
Time: 5-6.30PM
Location: Asian Centre Room 604
Address: 1871 West Mall • Vancouver, BC V6T1Z2
Marko Geslani (PhD, Yale University) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Occidental College. His research interests concern the early history of Hindu ritual, including the interface between fire sacrifice and image worship; Brahmanical orthodoxy; and Hindu astronomy/astrology. He has recently published an article in the Indo-Iranian Journal entitled “Santi Rites in the Development of the Puranic Rajyabhiseka” (2012).
Friday, April 5, 2013:
Timothy Lubin, Washington & Lee University
“How Brahmins Invented Themselves 3306 Times”
Time: 4-6PM
Location: Asian Centre Room 604
Address: 1871 West Mall • Vancouver, BC V6T1Z2
Timothy Lubin (PhD, Columbia University) is Professor of Religion and Lecturer in Religion and Law at Washington & Lee University. His research investigates Hindu ritual and ascetic practices, Hindu law and comparative legal theory, and the history of religion in early South Asia. Lubin has published widely on topics in the study of Hindu religious history and textuality, including Hinduism and Law: An Introduction, co-editedwith Don Davis (2010), “Ritual Self-Discipline as a Response to the Human Condition: Toward a Semiotics of Ritual Indices,” (2010), “The Transmission, Patronage, and Prestige of Brahmanical Piety from the Mauryas to the Guptas” (2005), and “Veda on Parade: Revivalist Ritual as Civic Spectacle” (2001). Professor Lubin is currently preparing a two-monograph project on the “inner” and “outer” dynamics of Brahmanical culture, entitled Dharma, Discipline, and Authority and Authority, Law, and the Polity in Premodern India.
Both talks are free and open to the general public.
