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Prof. David Shulman was born in 1949 in Iowa and immigrated to Israel in 1967. He completed his B.A. in Islamic History at the Hebrew University in 1971. His early love for Persian poetry and the Persian language led him eastwards to India, where Persian served as a major language of culture for over a thousand years. From 1972-1976 he studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, specializing in Tamil. His Ph.D. dissertation, completed in 1976, dealt with the mythic traditions of the hundreds of ancient temples in the Tamil country and the classical texts in Tamil and Sanskrit that document these traditions.
Since 1976 he has been teaching at the Hebrew University. In the 1980's he expanded his field of research to include Telugu, the language of Andhra Pradesh in southern India, and the literary treasures produced in Telugu over the last thousand years. He developed scientific collaborations with leading scholars such as Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. He has published some twenty books and many dozens of monographic essays on a variety of philological and historical subjects, mostly dealing with the cultural and religious history of southern India, poetry and poetics, historiography, philosophy of language, Tamil Islam, Hindustani music, the Indian game of dice, and others. Together with the anthropologist Don Handelman from the Hebrew University he carried out fieldwork on the goddess Gangamma in the famous pilgrimage site of Tirupati and on the "Golden Goddess" Paiditalli in northern Andhra Pradesh. He has translated many Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit texts into English and Hebrew. His work is primarily philological in the critical European tradition, but he has also studied with Indian masters in traditional scholarly modes.
His latest book, now nearing completion, is a history of the imagination in southern India. Recently he has turned to the study of the living tradition of Sanskrit theater, Kudiyattam, preserved in Kerala on the south-west coast of India, and has begun the study of Malayalam for this purpose. He sings in the Hindustani dhrupad style, and together with his wife Eileen has learned compositions in the southern Carnatic style as well.
He was awarded a MacArthur Prize (1987) and a Rothschild Prize (2004).
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