Introspection and Insight

Virtual

David Shulman has produced pathbreaking translations from Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit, as well as a history of the imagination in South India, among many other writings on the poetry, history, and spiritual cultures of India and on the politics of his adopted homeland, Israel.  He has recently completed a new book, Introspection and Insight: South Indian Minds in the Early Modern Era.  In this Chicago Dialogue, Professor Shulman will be in conversation with two of his colleagues from UChicago’s Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Gary Tubb and Whitney Cox.  Topics will include the changing modes of inner life since 1500 in the Deccan and further south, Shulman’s own early introspections during his childhood in Iowa, his long standing connections with the University of Chicago, and the relationship between his scholarship and his work for peace in Israel-Palestine.

Speaker Profiles

David Shulman

David Dean Shulman is an Israeli Indologist, poet and peace activist, known for his work on the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics, Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics, and Carnatic music.

Bilingual in Hebrew and English, he has mastered Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, and reads Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam. He was formerly Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and professor in the now defunct Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies[1],[2] and now holds an appointment as Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 1988. Read his detailed bio here.

Gary Tubb

Gary Tubb previously served as the faculty director for the University of Chicago Center in Delhi and chair and director of graduate studies in the South Asian Languages and Civilizations Department. He was also the chair of the Indian Ministry of Culture Vivekananda Visiting Professor search committee.  A leading Sanskrit scholar, Tubb examines the tradition’s poetics, grammatical forms and commentarial traditions, and draws insights across the culture’s philosophy, religion and literature. Tubb can speak Sanskrit, German, Hindi, and Urdu and is familiar with Marathi, French, Latin, Spanish, and Prakrit. Tubb is the author of Scholastic Sanskrit: A Handbook for Students. Gary's detailed bio is available to read here. 

Whitney Cox

Whitney Cox’s main interests are in the literary and intellectual history of southern India in the early second millennium CE.  Within that broad range, his research has concentrated on Sanskrit kāvya and poetic theory, the history of the Śaiva religion, and medieval Tamil literature and epigraphy, especially that of the Coḻa dynastic state.  Cox is also interested in the practice of literary translation and critical edition. After starting the study of Sanskrit as an undergraduate, and living in Madurai, Tamilnadu, Cox began graduate studies in SALC, culminating in the award of a PhD in 2006. He has lived and worked extensively in Tamilnadu, Karnataka, and Pondicherry.  Prior to joining the SALC faculty, Cox taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.  He has held awards from Fulbright-Hays, the British Academy, and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and has been a fellow in the Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Whitney's detailed bio can be read here.