Biography

John Stratton Hawley—informally, Jack—is Claire Tow Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has written or edited some twenty books on Hinduism, India’s bhakti traditions, and the comparative study of religion. These include A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard, 2015), Sur’s Ocean (with Kenneth Bryant, Harvard, 2015), and a poem-by-poem commentary on the early Sursagar called Into Sur’s Ocean (Harvard Oriental Series, 2016). A Storm of Songs, which is available as a paperback in South Asia, received the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy book prize of the Association for Asian Studies in March 2017.

Jack Hawley has directed Columbia University’s South Asia Institute and has received multiple awards from NEH, the Smithsonian, and the AIIS. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016-17 he has been in India as a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow, working on a project called “The New Vrindavan.”