Vasudha Dalmia
Professor Emerita
Ph.D. Jawaharlal Nehru University 1985
Habilitation, University of Heidelberg 1996
Vasudha Dalmia is a Professor Emerita of Hindi and Modern South Asian Studies. The body of her work may be described as the study of cultural formations, grouped around four broad thematic clusters: the politics of religious discourse, transitional cultural phenomena of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the politics of the literature of the new nation-state, particularly of modern Indian theatre, and studies of the position of women in these transitions. Her monograph, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth Century Benaras (1997), studies the life and writings of a major Hindi writer of the nineteenth century as the focal point for an examination of the intricate links between politics, language, culture, religion and nationality. Her work on drama, Poetics, Plays and Performances: The Politics of Modern Indian Theatre (2006), tracing the genealogies of theatre in modern at the appropriation of ‘folk’ theatre as it sought to constitute itself anew after independence. Of her edited works, The Oxford India Hinduism Reader (2007) appeared most recently.
Robert P. Goldman
Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania (Oriental Studies), 1971
B.A. Columbia College, 1964
Robert Goldman is the William and Catherine Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Sanskrit and India Studies. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971 and has taught and held fellowships and several academic institutions around the world, including the University of Rochester, Oxford University, Jadavpur University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. His areas of scholarly interest include Sanskrit literature and literary theory, Indian Epic Studies, and psychoanalytically oriented cultural studies. He has published widely in these areas, authoring several books and dozens of scholarly articles. He is perhaps best known for his work as the Director, General Editor, and a principal translator of a massive and fully annotated Princeton University Press translation of the critical edition of the Valmiki Ramayana, perhaps the single most widely copied and massively influential text on the religions, literatures, societies politics and general cultures of the entire region of South and Southeast Asia from antiquity to the modern world. His work has been recognized by several awards, fellowships and prizes including election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1966), Citation and Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of California at Berkeley (1974), Honorary Fellowship at Calcutta Sanskrit College (1992), Honorary Degree of “Vidyāsāgara” (“Ocean of Learning”) by the Mandākinī Saṃskṛta Vidvat Pariṣad, New Delhi (1997), President’s Certificate of Honour for Sanskrit (International) (2013), Excellence in Teaching Award presented by the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association ( 2016), the World Sanskrit Award 2017 presented by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, (2017) and the A.K. Ramanujan Translation Prize by the Association of Asian Studies (with Sally Sutherland Goldman) ( 2020).
Sally Goldman
Senior Lecturer Emerita of Sanskrit
Sally J. Sutherland Goldman received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1979, where she has taught Sanskrit and related subjects since 1981. She is the Associate Editor of the VālmīkiRāmāyaṇa Translation Project. She is the co-annotator of the Bālakāṇḍa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), and co-translator of the Sundarakāṇḍa (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1996), Yuddhakāṇḍa (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2016), and the Uttarakāṇḍa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016)). Dr. Sutherland Goldman has lectured, taught, and published widely in the areas of Sanskrit epic and literature and traditional South Asian constructions and representations of gender. She is co-author of the Devavāṇīpraveśikā: An Introduction to the Sanskrit Language (Berkeley: Centers for South and Southeast Asia Studies, U. C. Berkeley, 1980, 2004) and the editor of Bridging Worlds: Studies on Women in South Asia (Berkeley: Centers for South and Southeast Asia Studies, U. C. Berkeley 1991. Reprint: Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1991). A frequent visitor to India, she spent the Spring of 2010 as a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies at Jahwarhal Nehru University. She was selected as was a recepient of the the University of California at Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award for 2012.
George L. Hart
Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. Harvard University (Sanskrit and Indian Studies) 1971
George Hart has taught all areas of Tamil literature as well as courses on Indian Civilization, Indian literature, and Indian religion. His latest publication (with Hank Heifetz) is an annotated translation of the great Tamil classic, The 400 Poems of Wisdom and War (The Purananuru). He has written extensively on premodern Tamil, its relationship to classical Sanskrit, and South Indian religion and culture. He has also translated several important works from Tamil, and his work was nominated for The American Book Award.
James A. Matisoff
Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. University of California (Linguistics) 1967
James Matisoff, Professor of Linguistics and SSEAS, is a leading authority on Southeast Asian linguistics, especially on the diverse group of languages comprising the Tibeto-Burman family and has been on the Berkeley Linguistics faculty since 1970. He is the author of many books, monographs, and articles on Southeast Asian and general linguistics. He co-founded the annual International Conferences on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics in 1968. He is editor of the journal Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. He has been Principal Investigator of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project (STEDT) since 1987.