Description

Sucāruvādadeśika: A Festschrift Honoring Professor Theodore Riccardi
Todd Lewis & Bruce McCoy Owens (eds)
2014, pp. xii+398
ISBN 978 9937 597 13 5
Price: US$ 45.00
NPR: 900.00

Sucāruvādadeśika – a very beloved/beautiful/delightful teacher/guide whose speech/music is delightful – honors Professor Theodore Riccardi, Jr. of Columbia University through contributions by various of his students and colleagues. Professor Riccardi was known to them as an intellectual who studied, taught, mentored and served through the many years of his engagement with Nepal. The contributors to this volume reflect a range of academic expertise, moral engagement and artistic inspiration that he commanded among students, peers and colleagues, which they have tried to express in this festschrift.
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Todd Lewis finished his PhD in 1984 at Columbia, after doing research in the Asan Tol neighborhood of Kathmandu from 1979-1982. After teaching at the University of California-Berkeley, Rutgers, Columbia, and Carleton College, he joined the Religious Studies Department at the College of the Holy Cross in 1990. In addition to several dozen articles published in leading academic journals and edited scholarly volumes, Lewis has published two books on Newar Buddhism: Popular Buddhist Texts from Nepal: Narratives and Rituals of Newar Buddhism (State University of New York Press, 2000) and Sugata Saurabha: A Poem on the Life of the Buddha by Chittadhar Hridaya of Nepal (Harvard Oriental Series (67), 2008; Oxford University Press, 2010), in collaboration with Subarna Man Tuladhar. Professor Lewis has also co-authored the textbook World Religions Today (Oxford University Press, now in its fourth edition). Co-authored with Theodore Riccardi, Jr, was The Himalayas: A Syllabus of the Region’s History, Anthropology, and Religion that was published by the Asian Studies Association in 1995.

Bruce McCoy Owens is presently Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and co-coordinator of the Wheaton/Royal Thimphu College Exchange Program in Bhutan. He teaches courses on the Himalaya, South Asia, the Anthropology of Art, the Anthropology of Religion, and other topics. He has also taught at Harvard University, University of Chicago, and Columbia University, where he co-taught his first course on the Himalaya with Ted Riccardi and William Fisher. His research focuses on contestation in ritual and at sacred sites, including the festival of Buṃgadyāḥ/Rāto Matsyendranāth, Swayambhū, and the bāhāḥs and bahīs of the Kathmandu Valley.