John Stratton Hawley

Professor of Religion. Leading authority on bhakti and the devotional traditions of North India, on the religion of song and radical engagement of the heart. He published sixteen books and many articles, which together constitute a major body of texts and principles of interpretation for one of the most important and enduring strains of Hinduism. Several of his books focus especially on the worship of Krishna and his consort Radha: At Play with Krishna: Pilgrimage Dramas from Brindavan (1981); SurDas: Poet, Singer, Saint (1984); Krishna, the Butter Thief (1983); and The Memory of Love: Surdas Sings to Krishna (2009). Others explore broader themes in Hindu poetry and hagiography and in modern Hindu religion: Songs of the Saints of India (1988, 2004); Three Bhakti Voices: Mirabai, Surdas, and Kabir in Their Time and Ours (2005). Several edited volumes deal with women and goddesses, while others are broadly comparative, such as Fundamentalism and Gender (1994), The Life of Hinduism (2006, with Vasudha Narayanan) and Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination (2005, with Kimberley Patton). A definitive translation of poems early attributed to the great Hindi poet Surdas and a poem-by-poem commentary will appear in two major series at Harvard in 2015. His most recent project is a book entitled India's Real Religion: The Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard, 2014).