Jayaraj Acharya

Jayaraj Acharya, PhD in Linguistics (Kathmandu, Nepal), is currently a professor at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu. He has been educated medium Sanskrit in Nepal. In 1995 he has been a Fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University (Mass., USA); in 1994 a Fellow at the University of Leiden (The Netherlands). In 1991-1994 he was the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Nepal to the United Nations in New York. In 1991-1994 he was the Vice-Chairman of the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid; in 1991-1992 he was the Vice-Chairman of the UNICEF; in 1991-1992 he was the Vice-Chairman of the of the UN Disarmament Committee. In 1977-1983 he taught at the University of Kathmandu. His major publications include: The Nepala-mahatmya of the Skandapurana: Legends on the Sacred Places and Deities in Nepal, New Delhi 1992; A Descriptive Grammar of Nepali and an Analysed Corpus, Washington, D.C., 1991; Traditional Grammars, English and Nepali; A Study, Kathmandu, Kathmandu 1980; A Glossary of Business Administration and Public Administration, Kathmandu 1980. He has published several papers, mainly on Nepalese studies. In the Journal of South Asia Women Studies, he has published Sati was Not Enforced in Ancient Nepal (vol. 2, no. 2 - May 15, 1996).

Gregory Millet Bailey

Gregory Millet Bailey (PhD) is currently a Reader in Asian studies at La Trobe University (Australia). His main work is on Hindu epic and Puranas. He has taught "Women in Buddhism and Hinduism". His publications include: The Mythology of Brahma, New Delhi 1983; The Ganesha Purana. Volume One. Upasana Khanda, Wiesbaden 1995; (ed.), An Introduction to the Noble Path of Buddhism, Melbourne, 1985. Bailey has published several papers in refereed and non-refereed journals, anthologies, and specialized magazines: "Materials for the Study of Ancient Indian Ideologies", in Indologica Taurinensia, 19, 1985; "The Semantics of Bhakti in the Vamanapurana', in Rivista degli Studi Orientali, LXII, 1988; "Bhartrhari's manipulation of the feminine", in Indo-Iranian Journal, 39, 1986; "Hinduism" with Ms. P. McGee, in Living Religions, Mudge P. (ed.), Melbourne 1993; "Bhartrhari's Critique of Culture", in Asian Studies Papers - Research Series, 2 , 1994; "The Fundamental Problems of Contemporary Indology", in C. Galewicz (ed.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Sanskrit and Related Studies, Cracow 1995. He has been a Member of the organising committee for the Xth biennial conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (July 1996, La Trobe University); a member of the Board of Management of the National Centre for South Asian Studies (1995-1996); secretary of the committee organizing the 9th World Sanskrit Conference (January 1994). Bailey has also served as co-editor of several journals (Journal of Studies in Mysticism, Religious Traditions, etc.).

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

Gian Giuseppe Filippi, (Laurea, Venice, Italy 1972), teaches Indology at the University of Venice "Ca' Foscari", and is the Director of the Program for Interpreters and Translators at the same university. His main publications include: Una politica coloniale per la lingua, Venezia 1974; Tantrismo e Arte, Milano 1978; "Des composants culturels dans le Granthavali de Kabir", in Indologica Taurinensia, VI, 1980; "Note sul Tulsidas di Nirala", in Quaderni Asiatici, suppl. n. 1, 1983; "Il culto del Meru a Bali", in Annali di Ca' Foscari, 1989; Salute, Malattia, Morte: India ed Europa a confronto, G. G. Filippi (ed.), Milan 1991; "Cakravartin: mythic and historical symbols", in Annali di Ca' Foscari, 1991; "Bhavani Singh Parmar di Khajuraho", in Quaderni Asiatici, No. 24, 1991; "Bhavani Singh Parmar di Khajuraho", in Quaderni Asiatici, No. 25, 1992; "The secret of the Embryo according to the Garbha Upanishad", in Annali di Ca' Foscari, 1992; "Funzione delle arti nell'educazione gandhiana", in L' educazione nel pensiero del Mah-tma Gandhi, D. Dolcini (ed.), Milano, 1994; M-tyu: the Concept of Death in Indian Traditions, New Delhi 1996.

Geraldine H. Forbes

Geraldine H. Forbes (Ph.D. in History of South Asia) is currently a Professor of History and Director of Women's Studies at SUNY College at Oswego (NY, USA). She is the series editor of Foremother Legacies: Autobiographies and Memoirs of Women from Asia, Africa, the Middle East & Latin America (published by M. E. Sharpe). Her major publications include: (ed.), Manmohini Zutshi Sahgal, An Indian Freedom Fighter Recalls Her Life, 1994; Women in Modern India, a volume in the New Cambridge History of India series, 1996; An Historian's Perspective: Indian Women and the Freedom Movement, Bombay 1996; From Child Widow To Lady Doctor: The Intimate Memoir of Dr. Haimavati Sen, trans. Tapan Raychaudhuri, eds. Tapan Raychaudhuri and G. Forbes, (forthcoming); A Pattern of Life: the Memoirs of an Indian Woman, by Shudha Mazumdar, ed. G. Forbes, 1977 (rev. ed. 1989); Positivism in Bengal: A Case Study in the Transmission and Assimilation of an Ideology (Calcutta), 1975. In 1979 this book was selected for the Rabindra Puraskar, a prize awarded by the government of West Bengal. She has written more than twenty articles on South Asian women. She has won several awards, among which the 1995 New York State Progress in Equity Award by the N. Y. State Division of the American Association of University Women, for the college course "Women's Studies 300: Women in International Perspectives". In 1994 she was awarded a fellowship by the American Institute of Indian Studies for the research in India "Contextualizing the Memoirs of a Woman Doctor of India".

Himendra B. Thakur

Himendra B. Thakur is a civil engineer. He is the Chairman of the board of Directors of the International Society Against Dowry and Bride-Burning in India Inc. The ISADBBI is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization established by Thakur and incorporated in Massachusetts, USA, on December 22, 1993. It has an Indian division with representatives in Delhi and Bombay. Thakur published the book Don't Burn My Mother!, New York 1991; he edited the Souvenir of the First International Conference on Dowry and Bride-Burning, Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 1995, Cambridge, Mass., 1995.

Albrecht Wezler

Albrecht Wezler is Professor of Indology at the Institute für Kultur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets of the University of Hamburg (Germany). He is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik; he is the co-Editor, together with Prof. M. Witzel, of the book series (published by Walter de Gruyter in 1996 in New York and Berlin) Indian Philology and South Asian Studies, a new version of G. Bühler's Grundriss der Indo-Arischen Philologie und Alterthumskunde. Since 1970 Wezler has been the chief Director of the German-Nepal Research Project. Under his guidance more than 150,000 original Hindu and Buddhist manuscripts comprising more than 5,000,000 pages have been filmed. The original films are kept in Nepal, copies of the films are in Berlin. He is the regional Director for Germany of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies. His major publications include: Die wahren Speiseresteesser (Skt. vighasasin), Mainz 1978; Bestimmung und Angabe der Funktion von Sekundar-Suffixen durch Panini, Wiesbaden 1975; Bh-ngara in Sanskrit Literature, Aligarh 1987; Studien zum Jainismus und Buddhismus: Gedenkschrift für Ludwig Alsdorf (eds. K. Bruhn and A. Wezler), Wiesbaden 1981; Paribhasa IV, V und XV; Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der einheimischen indischen grammatischen Scholastik, Gehlen 1969; Proceedings of the XXXII International Congress for Asian and North African Studies, Hamburg 25th-30th August 1986, (eds. E. Hammerschmidt and A. Wezler), Stuttgart 1992. He has published on Sanskrit Grammar (e.g., "Once again on Patañjali's Definition of a Word (Studies on Patañjali Mahabhasya V)" in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens und Archiv für indische Philosophie 38, (1994); "Paralipomena zum Sarvasaratmakatvavada II" in Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 16/17 (1992); "Towards a Reconstruction of Indian Cultural History: Observations and Reflections on 18th-and 19th-Century Indology" in Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 18 (1993). More recently he has published on stridharma.

Carolyne Wright

Carolyne Wright (PhD in English and Creative Writing) was born in Seattle. In 1986-1988 she lived in Calcutta on an Indo-USA subcommission Fellowship to collect and translate the work of twentieth-century Bengali women poets and writers. In 1989-1991 she was in Dhaka on a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship to complete this translation project. Wright's translations from Bengali have appeared in many journals, including The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Triquarterly, American Poetry Review, The Spectator, The London Review of Books. Her work includes: two collections of translations from Bengali, The Game in Reverse: Poems by Taslima Nasrin (New York: George Braziller, 1995) and Another Spring, Darkness: Poems of Anuradha Mahapatra (Corvallis, Oregon: Calyx Books, 1996); four books of her own poems. She has collaborated to many specialized journals and she is writing a long paper on Bengali women poets for the Journal of South Asia Women Studies (to appear by February 1998). She has received several awards for her poetry and translations, including the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize, an Award for Outstanding Translation from the American Literary Tranlators' Association, a PEN/Jerard Fund Award. In 1991-92 she was a Fellow of the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College; from 1992-94, an Associate of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University; in 1995-96, she was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College (Mass., USA). She is currently a Lecturer at the Asian Studies Center at Emory University, Atlanta, where she teaches courses on Asian Women and on Creative Writing. She is editing two Bengali anthologies and working on several other books, including a memoir about her experiences in Bengal.