David D. Shulman

Professor David D. Shulman is the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at Hebrew University, formerly holding positions in the Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies. Shulman also was a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania. For forty years, he steadily opened up new fields of research through his publications about local Tamil myths, Telugu literature, and South Indian history, while also exemplifying and expanding the best traditions of Sanskrit learning. His list of publications is not only unusually long but varied in genres and disciplines--literature, religion, history, folklore, ritual, myth, translation, exegesis, art history, comparative studies, and anthropology. In spirit and effect his work has been, to borrow the title of his recent history of the imagination in South India, More Than Real (2012). As Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem from 1992-98, he inspired many scholars to join him in a series of wide-ranging international seminars. His work has earned him the Israel Prize, EMET Prize, and Rothschild Prize with membership in the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.