Karen Pechilis
Biographic Data
| ID | 1119807 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karen Pechilis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karen |
| FAMILY NAME | Pechilis |
| SIGNATURE | PECHILIS K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Drew University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 19 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Roundtable
In Religion and Gender ’s fifteenth year, this roundtable piece by the editors reflects on our history and the times in which we are working. The piece responds to three questions: 1) How has the scholarly field developed during the first fifteen years of Religion and Gender ? 2) How can we respond to the current economic and political context? 3) What challenges and opportunities does the future hold for religion and gender scholarship, and for …
Subjectivity and the Mind–Body Problem, from Medieval Sanskrit Philosophy to New Materialism
Loriliai Biernacki, The Matter of Wonder
Revisiting the Experiential World of Women's Bhakti Poetry
My recent research on an early female bhakti saint brought to the fore differences between her perspective as represented in poetry attributed to her and her medieval biographer's representation of her concerns. Through that study, the widespread academic use in recent scholarship of traditional biographies to interpret female bhakti saints became especially visible and problematic to me. In this experimental essay, I consider what patterns we mi…
Tamil Love Poetry
Tamil Love Poetry: The Five Hundred Short Poems of the Aiṅkurunūru. By Martha Ann Selby. Translations from the Asian Classics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. 195 + xii. $84.50 cloth; $27.50 (paper
Understanding Modern Gurus
Refiguring the Body
Śaivism in The Diaspora
Introduction
Experiencing the Mango Festival as a Ritual Dramatization of Hagiography
The author traveled to the coastal town of Kāraikkāl in Tamilnadu, south India in summer 2006 in order to explore the ways in which a festival celebrating a classical Hindu female saint would “tell” the story of her life as represented in a medieval canonical hagiography that the author had previously translated. By highlighting the oral mode of “telling” as a characterization of the festival's presentation, the author signals the performative, p…
Introduction
Introduction: Feminist Theory and the Study of South Asian Religions Karen Pechilis (bio) The essays in this section provide examples of scholars engaging feminist theory with materials from South Asian religious traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. The papers were originally presented on a panel, “Feminist Theory and the Study of South Asian Religions,” which was jointly sponsored by the Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection G…
Chosen Moments
Chosen Moments: Mediation and Direct Experience in the Life of the Classical Tamil Saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār Karen Pechilis (bio) Familiar patterns of interpretation can quickly tame a new text; that is their blessing and their curse. I had occasion to reflect on this issue of domestication—the moment at which a pattern of interpretation shifts its burden of illumination [End Page 11] onto the text itself, so that it domesticates the text as prima…
The Story of the Classical Tamil Woman Saint, Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār
Introduction
The Graceful Guru
The graceful guru
The embodiment of bhakti
"Bhakti, an influential religious perspective in India, has long been of interest to scholars; from the orientalists, who drew upon Sanskrit sources in their definition of bhakti as devotion to a personal deity, to modern scholars, who have explored bhakti poetry and the legends of its authors through sources in the regional languages of India. In this interpretive history of bhakti, both chronicle and comparison are used to identify and analyze …
Texts in Context
Contesting the Sacred
Songs of the Saints of India . John Stratton Hawley , Mark Juergensmeyer Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels
Introduction
Introduction: Feminist Theory and the Study of South Asian Religions Karen Pechilis (bio) The essays in this section provide examples of scholars engaging feminist theory with materials from South Asian religious traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. The papers were originally presented on a panel, “Feminist Theory and the Study of South Asian Religions,” which was jointly sponsored by the Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection G…
Chosen Moments
Chosen Moments: Mediation and Direct Experience in the Life of the Classical Tamil Saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār Karen Pechilis (bio) Familiar patterns of interpretation can quickly tame a new text; that is their blessing and their curse. I had occasion to reflect on this issue of domestication—the moment at which a pattern of interpretation shifts its burden of illumination [End Page 11] onto the text itself, so that it domesticates the text as prima…
The Story of the Classical Tamil Woman Saint, Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār
Introduction
Songs of the Saints of India . John Stratton Hawley , Mark Juergensmeyer Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels
Contesting the Sacred
Texts in Context
The embodiment of bhakti
"Bhakti, an influential religious perspective in India, has long been of interest to scholars; from the orientalists, who drew upon Sanskrit sources in their definition of bhakti as devotion to a personal deity, to modern scholars, who have explored bhakti poetry and the legends of its authors through sources in the regional languages of India. In this interpretive history of bhakti, both chronicle and comparison are used to identify and analyze …
The Graceful Guru
The graceful guru
The Story of the Classical Tamil Woman Saint, Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction: Feminist Theory and the Study of South Asian Religions Karen Pechilis (bio) The essays in this section provide examples of scholars engaging feminist theory with materials from South Asian religious traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. The papers were originally presented on a panel, “Feminist Theory and the Study of South Asian Religions,” which was jointly sponsored by the Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection G…
Chosen Moments
Chosen Moments: Mediation and Direct Experience in the Life of the Classical Tamil Saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār Karen Pechilis (bio) Familiar patterns of interpretation can quickly tame a new text; that is their blessing and their curse. I had occasion to reflect on this issue of domestication—the moment at which a pattern of interpretation shifts its burden of illumination [End Page 11] onto the text itself, so that it domesticates the text as prima…
Śaivism in The Diaspora
Introduction
Experiencing the Mango Festival as a Ritual Dramatization of Hagiography
The author traveled to the coastal town of Kāraikkāl in Tamilnadu, south India in summer 2006 in order to explore the ways in which a festival celebrating a classical Hindu female saint would “tell” the story of her life as represented in a medieval canonical hagiography that the author had previously translated. By highlighting the oral mode of “telling” as a characterization of the festival's presentation, the author signals the performative, p…
Refiguring the Body
Understanding Modern Gurus
Tamil Love Poetry
Tamil Love Poetry: The Five Hundred Short Poems of the Aiṅkurunūru. By Martha Ann Selby. Translations from the Asian Classics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. 195 + xii. $84.50 cloth; $27.50 (paper
Revisiting the Experiential World of Women's Bhakti Poetry
My recent research on an early female bhakti saint brought to the fore differences between her perspective as represented in poetry attributed to her and her medieval biographer's representation of her concerns. Through that study, the widespread academic use in recent scholarship of traditional biographies to interpret female bhakti saints became especially visible and problematic to me. In this experimental essay, I consider what patterns we mi…
Loriliai Biernacki, The Matter of Wonder
Subjectivity and the Mind–Body Problem, from Medieval Sanskrit Philosophy to New Materialism
Roundtable
In Religion and Gender ’s fifteenth year, this roundtable piece by the editors reflects on our history and the times in which we are working. The piece responds to three questions: 1) How has the scholarly field developed during the first fifteen years of Religion and Gender ? 2) How can we respond to the current economic and political context? 3) What challenges and opportunities does the future hold for religion and gender scholarship, and for …
Philosophy (14 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Hinduism (6 works) · History (6 works) · Indian and Buddhist Studies (6 works) · Theology (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works)