Sheldon I. Pollock

Areas of specialization include Sanskrit philology, Indian intellectual and literary history, and comparative intellectual history.

Publications include The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (2006), which won the Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association of Asian Studies, and the Lionel Trilling Award; Reader on Rasa: A Historical Sourcebook in Indian Aesthetics (in press); Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (editor, 2003); World Philology (co-editor, 2014). 

Founding Editor of the Murty Classical Library of India (Harvard); founding editor of South Asia Across the Disciplines (a collaborative venture of the University of California Press, University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press); co-editor and editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library (NYU). 

Past director of the international collaborative research project, Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism; co-director of the Columbia/Princeton “Comparative Project on China and India,” and of the Columbia/Heidelberg “Bilateral Digital Humanities Program” (NEH/DFG). 

Honors include the distinguished achievement award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the President's Award for Sanskrit, and the Padma Shri award, both from the Government of India; and a 2008 student arranged conference in his honor entitled Language, Culture and Power.