[INDOLOGY] DK Award 2015

[soni at staff.uni-marburg.de]

Since the 2006 WSC (World Sanskrit Conference) in Edinburgh the IASS  
(International Association of Sanskrit Studies) inaugurated the DK  
Award for the outstanding doctoral thesis on Sanskrit and allied  
studies in collaboration with DK Agencies, Delhi. This is usually  
announced at  a WSC.

Four candidates competed for the Award for theses submitted in the  
period 2012-2014 and successful completion of their doctorates:

1. Jens W. Borgland: “A Study of the Adhikaraṇavastu: Legal Settlement  
Procedures of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya”. University of Oslo,  
Faculty of Humanities, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental  
Languages, 2014.

2. Elaine Fisher: “A New Public Theology: Sanskrit and Society in  
Seventeenth-century South India”. Columbia University, Department of  
Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, 2013.

3. Michael Slouber: “Gāruḍa Medicine: A History of Snakebite and  
Religious Healing in South Asia”. South and Southeast Asian Studies,  
University of California, Berkeley, 2012.

4. Vijaya Subramani:
“Aesthetic Non-dualism” in text and practice: Contemporary Arts in the  
Light of the Rasagaṅgādhara”. Department of Politics, Philosophy and  
Religion, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK, September 2011.

On account of its philological achievements, the Panel of Adjudicators  
decided to give the DK Award 2015 to:

Dr Michael Slouber for his dissertation on: “Gāruḍa Medicine: A  
History of Snakebite and Religious Healing in South Asia”, submitted  
to the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of  
California, Berkeley, 2012.

The adjudicators would like to explicitly place on record that the  
thesis by Dr Elaine Fisher was also outstanding and that she should be  
mentioned honourably for her research work in the field of Sanskrit  
and Sanskrit studies. This was done at the IASS General Assembly  
Meeting in Bangkok after announcing the winner.

The next deadline for the Award is the end of January 2018 and  
depending on when exactly the next WSC will take place in Vancouver,  
Canada, the Award will be announced there.

For details of the Award, including previous winners, please see the  
website of the IASS:

http://www.sanskritassociation.org/dk-award.php

The IASS heartily congratulates the winner for the outstanding thesis.
Jay Soni
Secretary General of the IASS

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