Lindsey B. Harlan
Professor of Religious Studies
Chair of the Religious Studies Department

• History of religions
• Hinduism
• Religion and Gender
• Heroic Traditions

Professor Harlan's main area of interest is religion in South Asia, especially India. She has also done research and published on South Asian diaspora in the United States and Trinidad.  Most recently she has been working on traditions of hero veneration in the United States.

Her courses titled Hindu Tradition, Women and Religion in India, and Gods, Demons, and Ancestors treat various aspects of Hindu ritual and narrative traditions. Her general interest in religion is reflected in her course, Buddhist Tradition; and in her seminars, Heroes, Pilgrimage Narratives, and Religion and Conflict.

With support from a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Harlan is currently writing a book, tentatively entitled Lasting Impressions, which analyzes Indian hero cults in Rajasthan, a state in western India. Recently published (2003) with Oxford University is her book The Goddesses' Henchmen: Reflections on Gender in Indian Hero Worship, which examines narratives and songs performed by Rajputs, members of a martial caste. Her first book was Religion and Rajput Women (California: 1992), which analyzes the narrative traditions of Rajput women. Her interest in gender led to the publication she and Paul Courtright edited, From the Margins of Hindu Marriage: Essays on Gender, Religion, and Culture (Oxford: 1995), an interdisciplinary exploration of points at which the conceptual boundaries of marriage are crossed or transgressed. Her most recent essays treat the legitimation of Hindu marriage in colonial Trinidad and student celebration of the holiday of Divali in Connecticut.

Harlan has served on review panels for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.  She has also been elected to the steering committee of the Hinduism section of the American Academy of Religion.  Harlan directed with David Shulman in Jerusalem an international conference, "On Framing: Narrative, Metaphysics, Perception," which was supported by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Indian Embassy in Israel, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. In 1995-96, she was a residential research fellow at the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard. In 1991 she was a fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies and a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct research in India. In 1990 she was a fellow of the Dartmouth College Humanities Institute, where she conducted research related to the Institute's topic, "War and Gender." In addition, she has received a Kennedy Traveling Fellowship from Harvard University, a Copeland Postdoctoral Fellowship from Amherst College and a Fulbright Fellowship for research in India.

In 2004 Harlan received the College's Nancy Batson Nisbet Rash Faculty Research Award for excellence in academic research. Read her convocation address, "On Traveling, Teaching and Storytelling: Some Thoughts on Research."

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