Field of Study USA: Religious Studies

Joshua Shelton

Joshua Shelton is a doctoral candidate in the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University where he specializes in Buddhist and critical masculinities studies. His research focuses on the phenomenological textures of religious manhood in Tibetan tantra, seeking to illuminate the inflection points between masculinity as an abstract concept and manliness as an embodied enactment. His dissertation pursues these questions by attending to the life and writings of the nineteenth-century tantric virtuoso Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé, the gun-wielding, deer-hunting, beer-drinking tantric master descended from a line of “bloodthirsty bandits” in eastern Tibet.

Joshua earned his bachelor’s in religious studies and English literature at Georgetown University where his thesis on demon possession was awarded the Theta Alpha Kappa Award for excellence in undergraduate research. After college, Joshua spent two years at the Georgetown University Law Center working on his JD degree before deciding his passion for education and social service would be better served by a career in academia and activism. Joshua continued his graduate training in Buddhist studies at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder where he received the Moore Fellowship to conduct historiographic research on tantric masculinity for his master’s in Buddhist studies. At CU, he also served as the editor-in-chief for the university’s NEXT journal. He currently serves as the coordinator for the Khyentse Foundation Buddhist Studies Lecture Series at Northwestern University.

Joshua’s Fulbright-Nehru research is attending to the life, writings, and historical context of Do Khyentsé Yeshé Dorjé. His project emphasizes the structural roles masculinity plays as both abstract ideology and embodied practice in Tibetan religious history. Ultimately, Joshua’s thesis seeks to de-essentialize masculinity by situating it within history and alongside politics, economics, and sociology. It also emphasizes the role of non-secular Indigenous cosmology in the felt textures of religious manhood.

Gil Ben-Herut

Dr. Gil Ben-Herut is an associate professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. He holds a PhD in religious studies from Emory University and a BA and MA from Tel Aviv University in Israel. His research interests include premodern religious literature in the Kannada language, South Asian bhakti (devotional) traditions, translation in South Asia, and programming in digital humanities.

His book, Śiva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragaḷegaḷu (Oxford University Press, 2018), is the first study in English of the earliest Śaiva hagiographies in the Kannada-speaking region, and it argues for a reconsideration of the development of devotionalism as associated today with the Vīraśaivas. The book received the Best First Book Award for 2019 from the Southeastern Medieval Association and the 2020 Best Book Award from the Southeastern Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. Dr. Ben-Herut also received the Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award from the University of South Florida for the year 2020.

Dr. Ben-Herut recently completed co-translating selections from the Ragaḷe hagiographical collection for a book-length publication (under review). This project is funded by the American Academy of Religion’s Collaborative International Research Grant. His publications include a co-translation of a twelfth-century Kannada treatise about poetics, encyclopedic entries, a co-edited volume, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles. Dr. Ben-Herut is the co-founder of the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network, a platform for facilitating scholarly conversations about South Asian devotional traditions.

Utilizing his extensive experience in computer programming, Dr. Ben-Herut also leads several digital humanities projects, including digital ROSES and BHAVA. He is a member of the Digital India Learning Committee of the American Institute of Indian Studies and an active collaborator in digital projects about South Asian texts and languages involving open-source and open-access environments.

The textual “biography” of the vachana corpus – an expanding collection of devotional and lyrical poetry in Kannada from the twelfth century – spans over several key moments in the history of South India, starting with an innovative devotional practice of personal oral proclamations and then developing into a written canon that served as the fulcrum for a new religious sect, until finally becoming a cultural tool for biting social critique in the modern period. Dr. Ben-Herut’s Fulbright-Nehru project is examining how, nine centuries after their appearance, the vachanas became the most cherished literature in Kannada and an exemplar of sorts for spiritual poetry around the world.

Lauren Bausch

Prof. Lauren Bausch teaches at Dharma Realm Buddhist University, located in the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah, California. A specialist in the philosophy of the Brāhmaṇa texts, she is interested in exploring the relationship between Vedic tradition and early Indian Buddhism. She is the editor of Self, Sacrifice, and Cosmos: Vedic Thought, Ritual, and Philosophy (2019) and has written articles such as “The Kāṇva Brāhmaṇas and Buddhists in Kosala”, “Philosophy of Language in the Ṛgveda”, and “Bráhman as the Absolute in Late Brāhmaṇa Texts”. She completed her PhD in Sanskrit from the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2015.

Including a life-changing undergraduate semester in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Delhi and three semesters of dissertation fieldwork at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Prof. Bausch has been to India to study languages, conduct research, deliver lectures, and to volunteer. She has given invited lectures at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the National Museum, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Savitribai Phule Pune University. She received the first annual International Association of Sanskrit Studies’ Honorary Research Fellowship in 2019 and organized a Vedic conference at Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.

Prof. Bausch looks forward to building a community of scholars and practitioners that facilitates collaboration among Vedic and Buddhist specialists in the United States and India. She hopes that the book resulting from this Fulbright-Nehru research touches its readers by revealing something about their roots and will also give scholars of Hinduism a more comprehensive understanding of Vedic tradition and scholars of Buddhism a sound basis for understanding the cultural background of Gotama’s teachings.

Prof. Bausch’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the philosophy of language and causality that is articulated in middle and late Vedic texts. She is identifying and examining the discourses within these texts around the nature of man and the absolute creating itself to experience relativity, while situating the philosophy of the Brāhmaṇa texts in the intellectual history of India. Rather than interpreting ritual activity through the lens of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, her research is probing the cosmologies, mythologies, and explanatory connections found throughout the Brāhmaṇa texts themselves. The results are expected to shed more light on the relationship between late Vedic thought and early Buddhism.

David Monteserin Narayana

David Narayana is a PhD candidate in religious studies at Stanford University, working on South Asian religions and specializing in the history and practice of Śaivism. Born and raised in Spain, David began his undergraduate study of philosophy at the University of Oviedo (Spain, 2013) and he later received his BA in philosophy, summa cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts Boston (2017), completing two minors in both religious and South Asian studies. He then earned an MA in religion, with a concentration in Asian religions, from Yale Divinity School (2020).

David is a certified yoga instructor with teaching experience in Spain, India, and the U.S. He has also worked as a Spanish language teacher, interpreter, and translator. His interests lie in the fields of Indian and comparative philosophy, Sanskrit and Tamil literature, and yogic and tantric traditions (Hindu and Buddhist).

David’s Fulbright-Nehru project is telling the story of how a famous Hindu deity came to be worshiped in the form of empty space in a medieval South Indian temple. While the temple town of Chidambaram has been receiving considerable scholarly attention in the last decades, much of it has centered around the figure of Naṭarāja, the dancing Śiva. However, very little has been said about how Śiva came to be revered as space. David’s research is attempting to fill this gap by unearthing forgotten and unstudied texts in Sanskrit and Tamil that may provide a history for this belief and practice.

Beena (Veena) Howard

Dr. Beena (Veena) Howard is professor of Asian religious traditions in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Fresno. She holds the Endowed Chair in Jain and Hindu Dharma, and also serves as the director of the M.K. Gandhi Center: Inner Peace and Sarvodaya. Her publications include the books Gandhi’s Global Legacy: Moral Methods and Moral Challenges (ed., Lexington, 2023); The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender (ed., Bloomsbury, 2019); Dharma, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh Traditions of India (ed., I.B. Tauris, 2017); and Gandhi’s Ascetic Activism: Renunciation and Social Action (SUNY Press, 2013). She has also authored numerous peer-reviewed articles, including “The Nonviolence Conundrum: Political Peace and Personal Karma in Jain and Hindu Traditions”; “Nonviolence as Love in Action: James Lawson’s Transforming the Promise of Jesus’ Love into a Practical Force for Change”; “Divine Light and Melodies Lead the Way: The Santmat Tradition of Bihar”; “Lessons from ‘The Hawk and the Dove’: Reflections on the Mahābhārata’s Animal Parables and Ethical Predicaments”; and “Rethinking Gandhi’s Celibacy: Ascetic Power and the Empowerment of Women”. Notably, she has served on the Board of Trustees of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Dr. Howard is also a TEDx speaker.

Using philosophical and textual approaches and women and gender studies theories, Dr. Howard’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is seeking to create a conversation with the Jain advocates of women’s equality and education, Shrimad Rajchandra (1867–1901) and Virchand Gandhi (1864–1901), while studying the life and work of the female Jain activist, Mridula Sarabhai (1911–1973). Born in a distinguished family, Sarabhai adopted an austere life, defied patriarchal norms, and made heroic efforts to rehabilitate abducted Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim women in violence-stricken areas. Through archival resources, engagement with faculty and students at the International School of Jain Studies and local universities, as well as through interviews with the Sarabhai family and Jain female leaders and followers, Dr. Howard is seeking to further the questions of women’s struggle against gender bias and violence.

Lynna Dhanani

Dr. Lynna Dhanani obtained her doctorate from Yale University and joined the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis, in 2020 as an assistant professor of religious studies. She is currently working on her first major monograph, tentatively titled “Authority and Wonder: The Devotional Worlds of Hemacandra and Other Medieval Gujarati Hymn-makers”. Her research explores the confluence of interreligious polemics, philosophical debates, devotional themes, and poetics in the Sanskrit hymns of the celebrated 12th-century Svetambara Jain, Hemacandra, a court pandit to two Hindu kings of medieval Gujarat. Having dedicated herself to the study of multiple Indian religions for more than two decades, Dr. Dhanani has a wide range of interests, including Jainism, Sanskrit and Prakrit languages and literature, Indian philosophy and aesthetics, yoga, tantra, and especially South Asian religious art.

In 2023, she co-curated an exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum called “Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings”, and is currently a co-author for the exhibition book. As a recipient of the Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellowship (2022–23) and as part of the “Entanglements of Indian Pasts” project, she has shared her work on the great 20th-century Jain scholar Muni Jambuvijaya and his manuscript preservation projects. In 2022, she was the main organizer of the field-defining conference “Beyond Boundaries: In Honor of John E. Cort”, which brought together numerous scholars in honor of Dr. Cort, a prolific scholar in the fields of Jain and South Asian studies.

Dr. Dhanani’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the diversity of Jain hymns produced in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Apabhramsha languages in 11th–13th century Gujarat by the polymath Hemacandra and his contemporaries; the objective is to understand better their perceptions of the broader religious and intellectual worlds in which they flourished and their relationship with religious centers and the royal courts. In this context, she is exploring several libraries across north-west India and engaging local scholars, Jain communities, and Indian institutions in order to collect and analyze these hymns. This work will inform her first book manuscript as well as other publications.