Dear fellow Sanskritists,

The Third Australasian Sanskrit Conference will be held at the Women’s College, University of Sydney, 20-22 July, 2012.

Thanks to the generosity and collegiality of Australian Catholic University, we are delighted to announce that the keynote speaker will be Professor Francis X Clooney.

Professor Clooney is the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology at Harvard. After earning his doctorate in South Asian languages and civilizations (University of Chicago, 1984), he taught at Boston College until joining Harvard in 2005. His primary areas of scholarship are theological commentarial writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India. For many years he has served the academic community through membership of the editorial board of ten prestigious journals, including the European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, International Journal of Hindu Studies, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Theological Studies and Journal of Religious Ethics. He is the author of more than 14 books and over 160 book chapters and articles in leading journals. He is coming to Australia in mid-2012 as a Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow in the Asia-Pacific Centre for Inter-religious Dialogue and the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy at Australian Catholic University.

The conference web-site is https://sites.google.com/site/thirdasc2012. Information will be added to the site as it becomes available. Those interested in presenting a paper at the conference should submit a title and abstract of approximately 250 words by 31 March, 2012. The selection of papers and presentations will be made by members of the organising committee. Abstracts and all correspondence should be sent to ThirdASC@gmail.com.

With kind regards

The Organising Committee

Mark Allon, Jennifer Cover, Andrew McGarrity, University of Sydney (http://sydney.edu.au/arts/indian/)

Anita C. Ray, Australian Catholic University