Wendy Doniger - Biography

Biography

Doniger was born in New York City to immigrant non-observant Jewish parents, and raised in Great Neck NY, where her father, Lester L Doniger (1909–1971), ran a publishing business. While in high school, she studied dance under George Balanchine and Martha Graham. She graduated summa cum laude in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Radcliffe College in 1962, and received her M.A. from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in June 1963. She then studied in India in 1963–1964 with a 12-month Junior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies. She gained her first PhD from Harvard University in June 1968, with a dissertation on 'Asceticism and Sexuality in the Mythology of Siva,' supervised by Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Sr.. She obtained her second, a D. Phil. in Oriental Studies from Oxford University, in February 1973, with a dissertation on ‘The Origins of Heresy in Hindu Mythology,’ supervised by R.C.Zaehner. She has since been awarded six honorary doctorates.

Doniger holds the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Chair in History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has served on the editorial board of History of Religions since 1979, as well as editing a dozen other publications over her lifetime. In 1984 she was elected President of the American Academy of Religion, and in 1997 President of the Association for Asian Studies. She serves on the International Editorial Board of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

In June 2000, she was awarded the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for excellence in multi-cultural literature, non-fiction, for Splitting the Difference; and in October 2002, the Rose Mary Crawshay prize from the British Academy, for the best book about English literature written by a woman, for The Bedtrick. The American Academy of Religion awarded her the 2008 Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion. She was invited to give the 2010 Art Institute of Chicago President's Lecture at the Chicago Humanities Festival, which was entitled, "The Lingam Made Flesh: Split-Level Symbolism in Hindu Art"