Washington and Lee University

Faculty Member, Religion

Other Affiliations: French Institute of Pondicherry, Department of Indology
Washington and Lee University, Law

Professor

About

I work primarily on the history of religions in South and Southeast Asia, Sanskrit religious and normative texts, and the formation and spread of Brahmanical ideals and institutions prior to the modern period, with an increasing focus on legal norms and practices.  I combine philological and epigraphical studies with attention to historical processes.

I am in the midst of preparing a two-volume study on Brahmanical authority:
• Dharma, Discipline, and Authority: The Inner Dynamics of Brahmanical Culture.  A study of the “inner dynamics” of early Brahmanism: the use of disciplinary ritual regimens, developed between the 6th c. BCE and the 6th c. CE, to embody the ideals of the tradition, to provide a framework for its transmission, and to define the norms and markers of “high culture.”
• Authority, Law, and the Polity in Premodern India: The Outer Dynamics of Brahmanical Culture.  A study of the “outer dynamics” of Brahmanim: the institutional mechanisms by which a brahmin priestly elite succeeded in translating its religious authority into a vehicle for social, legal, and cultural influence between the 2nd c. and the 14th c. CE.

I am also finishing an edition and study of the Atharvaśiras, a short post-Gupta text that reflects the appropriation of Vedic authority by adherents of the Pāśupata sect; the late-medieval commentary of Nārāyaṇa is included. 

In both research and teaching, my focus is increasingly on legal norms and practices in South Asia, and their transmission to Southeast Asia.  In the last couple of years, this has come to include work on inscriptions in Prakrit, Sanskrit, and Tamil; I am laying the groundwork to include Old Javanese inscriptions and Āgamas as well.  These studies will form the basis for my contributions to a two-volume Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law, being edited by Caroline Humfress, David Ibbetson, and Patrick Olivelle (Cambridge University Press).
 
I have spent five years doing research in India, usually in Pondicherry, most recently in 2009-2010, as a Fulbright-Hays research fellow at the Institut français de Pondichéry, where I have been affiliated as an associated researcher since 2003.

In 2010-2011, I was an American Philosophical Society sabbatical fellow.

Contact Information