Indira Viswanathan Peterson

Indira Viswanathan Peterson is a literary critic and the David B. Truman Professor of Asian Studies at Mount Holyoke College. She is a specialist in South Asian Studies.

Background

Peterson was born and raised in Mumbai, India. She came to the United States as an AFS (American Field Service) exchange high school student in the late 1960s. She returned to Mumbai and received her B.A. in English literature from the University of Mumbai and her Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Harvard University in 1976. She has been a professor at Mount Holyoke since 1982, with a period at Columbia University from 2002 to 2004.

Select scholarship Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court: The Kiratarjuniya of Bharavi, 2003 Editor – Norton Anthology of World Literature , 2003 Editor – Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces , 1997 Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints, 1989