From Within a Campaka Flower: Ornamentation, Desire, and Distance at the Festival of Recitation at a South Indian Temple
Archana Venkatesan
Archana Venkatesan is Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests lie in the translation of early and medieval Tamil poetry into English and in the intersection of text, visuality, and performance in the temples of Tamil Nadu. Her books include The Secret Garland: Āṇṭāḷ’s Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoḻi (2010), A Hundred Measures of Time: Nammāḻvār’s Tiruviruttam (2014), and with Crispin Branfoot, In Andal’s Garden: Art, Ornament and Devotion in Srivilliputtur (2015). Her book, Endless Song: Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi (2020), received the 2021 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize from the American Literary Translators Association and the 2022 AK Ramanujan Translation Prize from the Association of Asian Studies. She is currently working on a project on nine interconnected Viṣṇu temples in Tamil Nadu known as the Nava Tirupati.
Her research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and Fulbright. She was also a UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow from 2014-2019. In 2022, Venkatesan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She founded the Religions of India Initiative at UC Davis, which advocates for the academic study of India’s diverse religious traditions.
Professor Venkatesan’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Kutten Lectureship in Religious Studies at CMC.
(Parents Dining Room)