Nell Shapiro Hawley
Nell Shapiro Hawley is a scholar of South Asian religions, primarily Hinduism. Her work addresses popular religious movements, gender and performance studies, and interactions between the classical and the contemporary. A longstanding area of focus has been the text and performance traditions of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata.
Research and Academic Interests
Dr. Hawley is working on two academic book projects about the long and global life of the Mahabharata. Her first book manuscript, titled Veiled Narration, concerns gender, narration, and the construction of alternate realities in two performance texts: the Virataparvan (the fourth and most popular book of the Mahabharata) and the Pancharatra (Five Nights), a Sanskrit play that is based on the Virataparvan and that has an ongoing presence in Kerala's Kutiyattam theater tradition.
Her next academic book project is a transregional cultural history of the Virataparvan. It is tentatively titled The War That Wasn't: The Virataparvan and the Fantasy Life of the Mahabharata. The book traces the unique popularity of the Virataparvan as the Mahabharata spread across South and Southeast Asia, showing that the Virataparvan has long played a special role in the creative life of the epic. The Virataparvan seems to be able to harness the dark, overwhelming power of the Mahabharata at large and reframe it so that it may be used as an auspicious agent of creativity and transformation.
Dr. Hawley has published articles in the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History (“Literature in Layers: An Early Theory of Retelling the Sanskrit Epics,” 2021) and the International Journal of Hindu Studies (“ ‘I Was Never a Tale, but the Truth:’ Fantasy, Language, and Second-Generation American Hinduism in Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah and the End of Time,” forthcoming in 2024). Her primary research language is Sanskrit; she also works with materials in Old Javanese.
In addition to her ongoing academic work, Dr. Hawley is currently writing a book for a wider audience: a biography of the popular American guru Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert, 1931-2019).
Teaching
At Vassar, Dr. Hawley teaches classes on South Asian religions. Her suite of courses includes “Superstories: The Popular Culture of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata,” “Devotion and Detachment: Lessons from the Bhagavad Gita,” “Hinduism, Literature, and Gender,” and “Yoga: A Twisted History.”