Apologies for cross-posting.

Dear Colleagues,

We would like to invite you to the next lecture in our “Emerging Scholars in Jain Studies” virtual series co-organized by the Departments of Religious Studies at UC Davis and UC Riverside. The lecture will be delivered by Dr. Eric Gurevitch (Harvard University) on Friday, March 30, 2025, 9:00-10:30am PT. You will find more information about the lecture and the speaker below, and on the attached flyer.

We are dedicating the event to Dr. Johannes Bronkhorst (1946–2025). Dr. Dominik Wujastyk (University of Alberta) will offer a tribute to Dr. Bronkhorst at the beginning of the event.

Register for the event here: https://ucr.zoom.us/meeting/register/v0IGheztRvS3z4s27cFrQA

Please note that you will need to sign into your Zoom account before entering the Zoom room.

Best wishes,

Ana Bajželj and Lynna Dhanani

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Putting Philosophy to Use: Jains Healing Bodies and Theorizing Caste in Medieval India

Philosophy in precolonial South Asia is often presented as the domain of otherworldly thinkers, who deployed erudite arguments to pursue questions of liberation. But starting in the medieval period, Jain authors employed in royal courts—at the center of political power—put the tools of philosophy to use as they struggled with everyday problems. This talk asks the seemingly simple question: What was philosophy in Sanskrit good for? It answers it by exploring how Jains in the world used techniques developed by epistemologists writing in Sanskrit to explore the practice of medicine and the reality—or unreality—of caste.

Dr. Eric Moses Gurevitch is a historian of science, technology, and medicine entering the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University as an Assistant Professor. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University, and he completed a PhD at the University of Chicago jointly in the Department of South Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on the Conceptual & Historical Studies of Science. Eric’s dissertation was awarded the DK Award for the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis on Sanskrit from the International Association of Sanskrit Studies; the Dissertation Prize from the Division of History of Science and Technology of the International Congress of History of Science and Technology; the Dissertation Award on the Formation of Knowledge from the University of Chicago; and the Mohini Jain Presidential Chair in Jain Studies Best Dissertation Award from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is currently finishing a book under contract with the University of Chicago Press and Permanent Black Press titled Everyday Sciences: Practical Knowledge and Knowledgeable Practice in South Asia. Now that the first book is (almost) finished, Eric is pursuing a second project that explores the literate and numerate practices of artisans and other people from caste-oppressed communities in medieval and early modern South Asia.

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