[INDOLOGY] On Sanskrit in the USA

Fri Jun 1 20:59:50 UTC 2018

Caroline Fitzgerald, as a member of the AOS, sounds perhaps more accomplished, but an even earlier instance of a woman studying Sanskrit in the U.S. appears to have been one Jessie Hainning, an interesting character in her own right who took lessons from the then president of Washington College (my employer) in the 1850s.  This tantalizing bit of information comes from:
https://books.google.com/books?id=vfR2AAAAMAAJ&q=Sanskrit+Lexington+Junkin&dq=Sanskrit+Lexington+Junkin&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ugnKUMacHMjr0QGOl4GQAg&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA
(Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend, by James I. Robertson, Macmillan, 1997, p. 173)

On Junkin:
http://home.wlu.edu/%7Elubint/SanskritatWLU.htm  (see the bottom of the page) and in more detail (but with no mention of Sanskrit):
http://www.frontierfamilies.net/family/junkin/family/C7GJ.htm
https://books.google.com/books?id=IS12qilW6wIC

Best,

Tim Lubin

Timothy Lubin
Professor of Religion and Adjunct Professor of Law
Chair of the Department of Religion
Chair of the Middle East and South Asia Studies Program
204 Tucker Hall
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, Virginia 24450

http://home.wlu.edu/~lubint
https://hcommons.org/members/lubin
http://wlu.academia.edu/TimothyLubin
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=930949

From: INDOLOGY <indology-bounces at list.indology.info<mailto:indology-bounces at list.indology.info>> on behalf of INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info<mailto:indology at list.indology.info>>
Reply-To: "Hueckstedt, Robert A. (rah2k)" <rah2k at virginia.edu<mailto:rah2k at virginia.edu>>
Date: Friday, June 1, 2018 at 2:50 PM
To: INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info<mailto:indology at list.indology.info>>
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] On Sanskrit in the USA

I may be getting a little off topic here, but perhaps the first female to study Sanskrit in the US did so at Yale, or at least under Whitney, perhaps privately. (Did Yale accept women at this time?) The woman’s name is Caroline Fitzgerald. She studied under Whitney in 1884-85, thereabouts, at the age of 19-20, and she was a Corporate Member of the American Oriental Society in 1886. She also corresponded with Lanman. There may be more about her in the AOS Library at Yale. Edward Burne-Jones painted a portrait of her, now in the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto.

Bob Hueckstedt

From: INDOLOGY [mailto:indology-bounces at list.indology.info] On Behalf Of Christophe Vielle via INDOLOGY
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2018 11:16 AM
To: Herman Tull <hermantull at gmail.com<mailto:hermantull at gmail.com>>
Cc: Indology <indology at list.indology.info<mailto:indology at list.indology.info>>
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] On Sanskrit in the USA

Note here the very useful on-line tool offered by Klaus Karttunen:

http://whowaswho-indology.info

So for Salisbury:
http://whowaswho-indology.info/5599/salisbury-edward-elbridge/

A near contemporary of Salisbury, also expert both in Arabic (that he studied with two disciples of de Sacy) and Sanskrit (learned in Bonn with Lassen), was the Swiss (from Geneva) Charles Rieu (1820-1902), who became Professor of Arabic in Cambridge.
http://whowaswho-indology.info/5212/rieu-charles-pierre-henri/
(his obituary in JRAS 1902 is available here:     https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0035869X00029737 )

Le 31 mai 2018 à 16:38, Herman Tull via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info<mailto:indology at list.indology.info>> a écrit :

For those interested, Salisbury, who founded Sanskrit studies at Yale, was recently "rediscovered,", and there is some fascinating information about his program of "Oriental Studies" at Yale.

https://salisbury175.yale.edu/news/yale-marks-175th-anniversary-arabic-and-islamic-studies-exhibit-public-events

Among the many interesting tidbits was that Salisbury, by his own admission, was not much of a Sanskritist (or, much of a teacher), and had only two Sanskrit students (none in Arabic, which he seems to have known). One of his two students was W. D. Whitney. Whitney, went on to study in Germany, and then was appointed at Yale through Salisbury's generosity. Salisbury, who died around 1900, is said to have left an endowment valued at $130,000 in 19th c. dollars. Assuming it was all in cash (and it likely was not), that would today be an endowment of $3.5 million (US). Certainly enough to maintain Sanskrit at Yale!

Herman Tull
Princeton, NJ

On Wed, May 30, 2018 at 12:53 PM Christophe Vielle via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info<mailto:indology at list.indology.info>> wrote:
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2018/04/17/yales-last-sanskrit-expert-to-leave/

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Christophe Vielle<https://uclouvain.be/en/directories/christophe.vielle>
Louvain-la-Neuve

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Christophe Vielle<https://uclouvain.be/en/directories/christophe.vielle>
Louvain-la-Neuve

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