A Vital Matters Voice: Lynna Dhanani
Lynna
Dhanani
Assistant Professor
Religious Studies, University of California, Davis
BIOGRAPHY
Lynna R. Dhanani (PhD, Religious Studies, Yale University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of California, Davis. Her current book project, tentatively titled Polemics of Dispassion and Production of Wonder: The Multilingual Praise Worlds of Hemacandra and Medieval Gujarati Hymnists, explores how the confluence of polemics and poetics in the Sanskrit and old vernacular hymns of the Śvetāmbara Jain scholar-monk Hemacandra (1089–1172) and his contemporaries were used to negotiate Jain devotion within the larger arena of Indian religiosity. Dhanani received a Fulbright Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Research Fellowship in India (2024-25) and a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellowship (2022-23) at the University of Chicago for her work on the Indian manuscript preservation projects of the great 20th-century Jain scholar-monk Muni Jambūvijaya. She co-curated the 2022-23 exhibition Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings at the UCLA Fowler museum and is a co-author of the exhibition volume.
