Meet the Artiste: David Shulman at NCPA

David Shulman is Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. A student of John Marr, he was trained in Tamil and Sanskrit at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He specializes in the languages, literatures, and religions of southern India, particularly in the medieval period. He has published widely in these fields, including long-standing scholarly collaborations with Velcheru Narayana Rao, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Don Handelman.

His works include Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the Tamil Saiva Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1980); The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry (Princeton University Press, 1985); The Wisdom of Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit (Oxford University Press, 2001); with Velcheru Narayana Rao, A Poem at the Right Moment (OUP, 1998); with Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800 (Permanent Black, 2002); and most recently, Spring, Heat, Rains: A South Indian Diary (University of Chicago Press, 2000).

He has translated extensively from Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit and is now preparing a volume of translations from Sangam poetry into Hebrew. He is deeply interested in Hindustani and Carnatic music. David Shulman will read from his translations of Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Persian and Russian poetry, and will discuss the challenges of translation, his fascination with the literature of southern India, and his recent project on the history of the imagination.