Professor
Department Chair
219A Milbank Hall
T: 212.854.5292
E: jsh3@columbia.edu
Office Hours

John Stratton Hawley (a.k.a. Jack) is Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University and chair of the department. He is the author or editor of some fifteen books, most of them having to do with Hinduism and the religions of India. He has served as director of Columbia's Southern Asian Institute; has received multiple awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian, and the American Institute of Indian Studies; and has been a Guggenheim Fellow. Educated at Amherst College (A.B., European History, 1963), Union Theological Seminary (M. Div., Hebrew Bible, 1966), and Harvard University (Ph.D., Hinduism and Comparative Religion, 1977), he has taught at Barnard and Columbia since 1986.

Hawley's research especially concerns the devotional religion of North India. He has explored the worship of Krishna and his consort Radha in a series of works including At Play with Krishna, Krishna, the Butter Thief, and The Divine Consort, the latter edited with Donna Wulff. The 16th-century poet Surdas, widely regarded as North India's finest poet of Krishna, is featured in Krishna, the Butter Thief, Sur Das: Poet, Singer, Saint, and a major forthcoming book entitled Sur's Ocean. Sur's Ocean, named after the vast collection of poetry that came to be attributed to Surdas, presents a verse translation and poem-by-poem commentary for each of the 400+ compositions that can be confidently traced back to the 16th century itself. The second volume of Sur's Ocean, by Kenneth E. Bryant, is a critical edition displaying those results in the original Hindi or, to be precise, Brajbhasa. In another forthcoming work Hawley pares back Sur's Ocean for a paperback readership interested in the world's literary classics. Its tentative title is Surdas: Poems for Krishna.

Other poet-saints who anchor the religious imagination of Hindus and others living in North India also figure in Hawley's work. Songs of the Saints of India, written with Mark Juergensmeyer and recently revised for a second edition, introduces the lives and compositions of six of the most important of these; it has been widely used in English-language classrooms. A deeper probing of issues of memory and interpretation that surround these poet-saints can be found in Three Bhakti Voices: Mirabai, Surdas, and Kabir in Their Time and Ours.

Hawley has worked with other scholars on a series of edited volumes. Some of these concern India - Sati: The Blessing and the Curse, Devi: Goddesses of India, and most recently The Life of Hinduism, a students' guide to Hinduism as a lived tradition co-edited with Vasudha Narayanan. Other volumes Hawley has edited are comparative in nature - one on religious exemplitude (Saints and Virtues), another on Fundamentalism and Gender. Gender also emerges as a major theme in Hawley's most recent co-edited book (with Kimberley Patton), called Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination.

Two current projects point in different directions. One is firmly Indian: how did we come to have the common-sensical idea that something called "the bhakti movement" was a major force in the religious history of South Asia? The second project is less Indian than American, less historical than ethnographic. God's Vacation explores three religious utopias in the United States - one Hindu, one Buddhist, and one Protestant Christian - and asks about the special relationship that binds religion to memory and retreat.

Complete CV (PDF, 148 KB)

Courses
Recent, Current, and Projected

• The Bhakti Movement
• Bhakti Texts of North India
  
  • Surdas and the Devotional Literature of Krishna
  • Tulsidas and the Devotional Literature of Rama
  • The Bhaktamal of Nabhadas
  • The Sants: Kabir, Ravidas, et al.
  • Mirabai
• Comparative Fundamentalism
• Hinduism
• Hinduism Here
• Introduction to Asian Religions / Self and Society in Asian Religions
• Issues in South Asian Religion: Colonial Knowledge and the Construction of Hinduism; Bhakti and Vernacularity; Hindu Borders.
• Krishna
• Pilgrimage in Asian Practice
• Religion vs. the Academy
• Religious Worlds of New York
• World Religions
  
  • Idea, Display, Institution (graduate colloquium)
  • Idea and Enactment (Religion W4801)

Office Hours (Fall 2008)

Thursdays 4:15-6:00 PM and by appointment.