Professor
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. 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. It builds on the critical edition of Surdas poetry being prepared by Kenneth E. Bryant. In The Memory of Love: Surdas Sings to Krishna (Oxford University Press, 2009) Hawley pares back Sur's Ocean for a paperback readership interested in the world's literary classics.

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 revised for a second edition in 2004, 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 (Oxford University Press, 2005).

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 (University of California Press, 2006), a guide to Hinduism as a lived tradition co-edited with Vasudha Narayanan. Other volumes Hawley has edited are comparative in nature: Saints and Virtues, Fundamentalism and Gender, and most recently Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination (with Kimberley Patton, Princeton University Press, 2005).

Hawley's current book project asks how we came to have the common-sense notion that something called "the bhakti movement" was a major force in the religious history of South Asia. The Bhakti Movement: Excavations in a Master Narrative involves everything from manuscript searches to personal interviews and spreads out from north India to a much broader geographical base. A second project waits in the wings: God's Vacation, a study of three religious utopias in the United States—one Hindu, one Buddhist, one Protestant Christian. Its subject is the special relationship that binds religion to memory and retreat.

Complete CV (PDF)

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 (Spring 2010)

Thursdays 4-6, and by appointment.