Dr. Anand Venkatkrishnan

Assistant Professor

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Biography

Anand Venkatkrishnan is an intellectual historian focusing on South Asian religion. His book, "Love Time Scholarship: Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Indian Intellectual History," explores how popular religion has shaped the everyday lives of Sanskrit scholars in early modern India. This study illustrates how vernacular-language practices and bhakti have reshaped the writing of elite systems of Sanskrit learning. Venkatkrishnan is also involved in additional research projects, including "Searching Sarasvati," which examines an alternative history of American Indology that focuses on the written past and present. His work engages classical Sanskrit literature, gender and sexuality studies, African American history, and Asian American studies, probing the questions of how these matters are read in contemporary discourse. He is associated with a group of loosely affiliated religious intellectuals in modern India who are involved in the political left and articulates a critique of modernist, bourgeois Hinduism.

Research Interests