Humbert Lecture on Religions and Public Life to Feature Dr. Anand Venkatkrishnan
Humbert Lecture on Religions and Public Life to Feature Dr. Anand Venkatkrishnan
EUREKA– Eureka College is proud to announce the upcoming Humbert Lecture on Religions and Public Life, which will take place on Tuesday, February 4, 2025, at 7pm. The lecture will be held in the Becker Auditorium, located on the scenic campus of Eureka College. This event is free and open to the public, offering a unique opportunity to engage with thought-provoking discourse on the topic of experiential discovery and human possibility.
The lecture, titled "Fear needs Ablative, Love needs Locative: The Promise and Peril of Classical Learning" will be delivered by the distinguished speaker, Dr. Venkatkrishnan, an Assistant Professor, of the University of Chicago, and an intellectual historian of South Asian religion.
Dr. Anand Venkatkrishnan will discuss what he has learned while studying South Asian religion and how it has shaped the way Sanskrit scholars look at the text in the modern day. His presentation will encourage attendees to look at the impact religion has in today's world. Dr. Venkatkrishnan's insights promise to inspire fresh perspectives and dialogues on the role of belief in our lives and communities.
Speaker Bio:
Anand Venkatkrishnan is an intellectual historian of South Asian religion. His first book, Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa in Indian Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), explores how popular religion shaped the everyday lives of Sanskrit scholars in early modern India. It shows that the vernacular-language, quotidian practices of bhakti reshaped writing in elite systems of Sanskrit learning. He is at work on two additional research projects. The first, searching for Sarasvati, is a social and intimate history of classical South Asian studies in twentieth-century America. Through intellectual biographies of women scholars, teachers, and artists written out of the field's past and present, it explores the question of whether how you live matters to how you read. The other, Left- Hand Practice, concerns a group of loosely affiliated religious intellectuals in modern India involved with the political left. Each, in their own way, articulated a critique of modernist, bourgeois Hinduism.
About Eureka College
Located on nearly 70 wooded acres in Eureka, Illinois, and chartered in 1855, Eureka College cultivates excellence in learning, service and leadership while providing students uniquely personalized educational opportunities. Eureka College holds the unique distinction of being the first college in Illinois and among the first in the nation to admit men and women on an equal basis. The College, originally founded by abolitionist members of Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), is the smallest of only 24 colleges and universities to ever award a bachelor’s degree to a future President of the United States
