Professors to speak at future humanities lectures

Professors
to speak at future humanities lectures

BY ELLEN CHANG
Rice News staff

Two well-known
Asian studies professors will discuss women, myths and two
Bengali poets during upcoming lectures.

Wendy Doniger,
the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the
History of Religions at the University of Chicago, will
discuss “The Mythology of Marital Resurrection: The
Falsely Accused Woman Who Returned from the Dead” at
7:30 p.m. Feb. 3 in the amphitheater of Herzstein Hall.

Jeffrey Kripal,
the Lynette S. Autry Associate Professor of Religious Studies
and director of the Asian Studies program at Rice, said
Doniger is slated to discuss myths throughout the world
about women who are unjustly accused of infidelity, disappear
or die and then return as themselves.

“Her talk
spans Shakespeare, Indian epic stories, Hollywood movies
and contemporary literature in order to explore the mythology
and mystery of human identity through its masks, its transformations
and its illusions,” he said.

Doniger researches
and teaches Hinduism and mythology. Her courses in mythology
address themes in cross-cultural expanses, while her courses
in Hinduism cover a broad spectrum that includes mythology,
literature, law, gender and ecology. Her cross-cultural
classes have covered topics about death, dreams, evil, horses,
sex and women.

She has written
several books, published more than 200 articles and many
reviews. Her latest book, “The Woman Who Pretended
To Be Who She Was,” was published in 2003.

“Wendy Doniger
is one of our most accomplished mythologists who is known
and appreciated around the world for her sparkling writing
style, her cross-cultural insights, her humor and her penchant
for things erotic and religious,” Kripal said. “Within
the discipline of the history of religions, she is also
one of our most distinguished proponents and defenders of
the comparative method, which is the conviction that the
comparison of materials from widely divergent cultures and
times can teach us things about religion and humanity that
we could not otherwise learn.”

In another humanities
lecture, William Radice, senior lecturer in Bengali at the
School of Oriental and African Studies at the University
of London, will speak at 4 p.m. Feb. 9 in the Humanities
Building, room 117.

Radice will discuss
“Confession Versus the Exclamation Mark: Why Rabindranath
Tagore Did Not Like the Poetry of Michael Madhusudan Dutt.”
Tagore and Dutt are two accomplished Bengali poets whose
works Radice has translated and studied.

Radice has pursued
a double career as a poet and as a scholar and translator
of Bengali. He has written and edited nearly 30 books. He
wrote the libretto for Param Vir’s widely performed
chamber opera “Snatched by the Gods” in 1992,
and in 1995 he translated Giacomo Puccini’s “Turandot”
for the English National Opera. Radice has given numerous
lectures and poetry readings in Britain, India, Bangladesh,
North America, Germany, Mallorca and other European countries.
He has been awarded literary prizes in both India and Bangladesh.
From 1999 to 2002, he wrote a biweekly “Letter from
England” for the Statesman in India, and he has also
contributed regularly to BBC Radio 2’s early morning
show, “Pause for Thought.”

“William
Radice is an accomplished translator of both Bengali and
German literature and a remarkable English poet and storyteller
in his own right,” said Kripal.

Both lectures
are sponsored by the Asian Studies Program and the Center
for the Study of Cultures.