Hindu, mythology scholar to give Presidential Lecture

Wendy Doniger, a scholar of Hindu and cross-cultural mythology at the University of Chicago, is scheduled to present the next Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 23, in Room 190 of the Law School.

The lecture is titled "Self-Imitation in Ancient India, Shakespeare and Hollywood." Doniger also will participate in a discussion at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 24, in the Humanities Center. Both events, organized by the Humanities Center, are free and open to the public.

Doniger was born in New York City in 1940. In the mid-1950s she trained as a dancer under George Balanchine and Martha Graham. In 1962, she graduated from Radcliffe College and went on to earn a doctorate in Sanskrit and Indian studies from Harvard (1968) and a doctorate in Oriental studies from Oxford University (1973).

With psychoanalyst and scholar Sudhir Kakar, Doniger recently completed a new translation of the Kamasutra (Oxford University Press, 2002). She has written extensively on Hinduism and mythology, particularly in relation to issues of gender and sex. She is the author of Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva (1973), The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (1976), Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts (1980), Tales of Sex and Violence: Folklore, Sacrifice and Danger in the Jaiminiya Brahmana (1985), Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (1996) and The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2000), among other books. In addition, she has published a number of translations from the Sanskrit and edited (or co-edited) several volumes, including The Critical Study of Sacred Texts (1979), Off with Her Head! The Denial of Women's Identity in Myth, Religion and Culture (1995) and Myth and Method (1996).