Professor Patrick Olivelle
Professor Olivelle is noted for his work on early Indian law, religion, and asceticism,. His latest work, Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King (2024) is a biography reconstructing the life and legacy of this unique figure and most famous emperor in South Asian history.
Olivelle received his BA and MA from Oxford University and PhD from University of Pennsylvania. He taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington (1974–1991), where he was the Department Chair 1984-90, and in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin (1991–2013), where he was the Department Chair 1994–2007.
Elected as President of the American Oriental Society (2005), and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020), he has received the Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Chicago (2016); Prize of Fondation Colette Caillat of the Institut de France (2017) for his book Dharma Reader; and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996). He was the Gonda Lecturer at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. His publications include the ground-breaking work The Āśrama System: History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (winner of the 1994 American Academy of Religon book award) and acclaimed English translations of the major Upaniṣads (winner of the 1998 Association for Asian Studies Ramanujan prize for translation), Pañcatantra, Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita, and Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, as well as critical editions and translations of Dharmaśāstras, including those of Manu, Yājñavalkya, and Viṣṇu. He has edited or co-edited significant volumes: Between the Empires: Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE (2006); Dharma: Studies in Its Semantic, Cultural, and Religious History (2004); Reimagining Aśoka: Memory and History (2012); The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Law: A New History of Dharmaśāstra (2018); Gṛhastha: The Householder in Ancient Indian Religious Culture (2019), and most recently the Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law (2024).
Associate Professor Malvika Maheshwari
Malvika Maheshwari is Associate Professor of Political Science at Ashoka University. She holds degrees in political science from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, and she completed her doctorate at Sciences Po, Paris, in 2011. Before joining Ashoka University, she taught South Asian politics at Sciences Po (Paris and Le Havre) and served as a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
Her research lies at the intersection of political thought and art practice, focusing on phenomena such as violence, power, democracy, and state capacity. Her first book, Art Attacks: Violence and Offence-taking in India, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Her research articles have appeared in several esteemed journals, including India Review, Raisons Politiques, Studies in Indian Politics, Economic and Political Weekly, and The Arts Politic.
In Fall 2022, she was a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at Cambridge University, working on her second book project on the National Akademies of Art and the politics of administering aesthetics in postcolonial India, partially funded by the Global Humanities Initiative travel grant. Additionally, in 2023 she received the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fellowship and in 2024, she was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University.
