Subjunctive Explorations – Fictive Sufi Tales of Early Modern Bengal: The 2nd ISAS-VSB Lecture on Religion in the Modern World

Tony Stewart is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities and Professor and Chair, Department of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is a specialist in the religions and literatures of the Bengali-speaking world. His work on Vaisnava traditions of Hindu Bengal was titled The Final Word: the Caitanya Caritamrta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition (Oxford 2010), a study of the hagiographies of the Bengali god-man Krsna Caitanya. He translated the Bengali and Sanskrit text of the Caitanya Caritamrta of Krsnadasa Kaviraja with Edward C. Dimock (Harvard Oriental Series 1999) and translated Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s Vaisnava poetry with Chase Twichell, titled The Lover of God (Copper Canyon 2004). Fabulous Females and Peerless Pirs (Oxford 2004) laid the foundations for his current monograph, Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming), a study that addresses the cultural work of folk literatures. Dr. Stewart’s current and ongoing projects include an anthology of translated tales, tentatively titled The Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Five Miracle Tales of Bengali Sufi Saints and a multivolume translation of the medieval epic Candi Mangal of Kavikankan for the Murty Classical Library of India (Harvard).