Meet the Faculty

Rebecca Manring

  • Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies

Education

  • Ph.D. at University of Washington, 1995

Contact Information

Sycamore Hall, Rm. 326
(812) 855-6756

Background

  • Indiana University Summer Faculty Research Fellowship 2003
  • Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences Summer Research Fellowship 2001
  • Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences International Travel award, to present an invited paper at the Eighth International Conference on Early Literatures in New Indo-Aryan Languages, Leuven, Belgium 2000
  • American Institute of Indian Studies senior research fellowship to catalogue and microfilm Sukumar Sen manuscript collection, West Bengal, India (project completed 2/2001).
  • Indiana Network for Development of India Awareness travel grant to attend 1999 Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin.
  • Indiana Network for Development of India Awareness travel grant to attend Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin 1997
  • University of Washington Graduate School Dissertation Fellowship 1994
  • American Institute of Bangladesh Studies Junior Fellowship (Bangladesh) 1993-94
  • Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship 1992-93 (India)

Rebecca Manring My research centers on the Bengali Vaishnava community of northeastern India. My last project, Reconstructing Tradition: Advaita Acarya and Gaudiya Vaisnavism at the Cusp of the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2005), explores the use of the hagiographical corpus treating Advaita Acharya, one of the early leaders of Bengali Vaishnavism. Controversy surrounding dates of composition of several of these works led to my discovery of how western education of certain elite Bengalis impacted the nineteenth-century reformation of the entire Vaishnava movement, and led to the production of an entirely new, self-conscious type of hagiography. I anticipate publishing a translation of "Advaita Prakasa," one of the more interesting of these hagiographies, in the near future. Another important current project concerns the preservation of the Sukumar Sen manuscript collection. Sukumar Sen, perhaps this century's leading scholar of Bengali literature, and the individual most responsible for the spread of interest in that literature outside of the region, amassed an impressive manuscript collection during his lifetime. Our preserving his collection in toto now allows scholars a glimpse of what, in the eyes of that prominent scholar, constitutes Bengali literature. I've produced a catalogue of the collection (Resources for Scholarship on Asia, published by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2006), and the IU library now owns one copy of the microfilm of the manuscripts. My next book project treats sectarian Sanskrit grammars. Scholars in various religious traditions around South Asia developed such grammars, often modelled on Panini's masterful work but using sectarian tropes to illustrate each grammatical issue raised. Like the hagiographies, these grammars were intended not just to instruct, but to serve definite political purposes. In this project I am studying the grammar Jiva Gosvami developed for Bengali Vaishnava scholars. I teach courses in Sanskrit, women in South Asian religious traditions, the religions of Asia, and literatures of India in translation. 75% of my appointment is in the India Studies Program, and I am an adjunct member of the Comparative Literature Department.

Research Interests

  • Asian Languages and Literature (Sanskrit, Bengali, Middle Bengali)
  • South Asian Hagiography
  • Formation of Religious Community
  • Women in South Asian Religious Traditions

Courses Recently Taught

  • Religions of the East
  • Medieval Devotional Literatures of India
  • Women in South Asian Religions
  • Hindi
  • Sanskrit

Publication Highlights

Books

Reconstructing Tradition: Advaita Acarya and Gaudiya Vaisnavism at the Cusp of the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Articles

Vaisnava Jīvanī-Sāhityacarcāya Sukumāra Sena in Bańgīya Sāhitya Parisat Patrikā, Vol.106, No. 1-4, 1409 Bengali Era (2002 C.E.), pp. 99-102.

The Sukumar Sen (Barddhamān Sāhitya Sabhā) Manuscript Collection, in the Sukumar Sen Centenary Volume, Pavitra Sarkar, editor. Bangla Academy, Kolkata, 2002.

Vaisnava Jīvanīra Carcā o Sukumara Sena, in Bangīya Sāhitya Parisat Patrikā, 2002.

Sita Devi: An Early Vaisnava Guru, in The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States, Karen Pechilis-Prentiss, editor. Oxford University Press, 2002.

The Gaudīya Vaisnava Philosophy and the Life of Advaitācārya, Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Vol. XLIX No. 9. October 1998.

At Home in the World: The Lives of Sītādevī, International Journal of Hindu Studies, Volume 2, No. 1 (1998):21-42.

Advaitaprakāśa: Questions of authenticity in Vaisnava hagiography, Studies in Early Modern Indo-Aryan Language, Literature and Culture, edited by Alan W. Entwistle and Carol Salomon. Delhi: Munshiram Manohar

2009 Summer Prof Manring is in Dhaka, read about her summer.