Archana Venkatesan

Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis
Archana Venkatesan is Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests are in the intersection of text, performance, and visual culture in South India, and in the translation of Tamil religious poetry into English. Her translations are inflected and inspired by extensive fieldwork in the temples of South India, where Tamil devotional poetry continues to be read, recited, interpreted, and performed. Her current research (begun in 2005) is on the annual Festival of Recitation celebrated at a network of eleven temples in Tirunelveli District, Tamil Nadu. She is the author of The Secret Garland: Āṇṭāḷ’s Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoḻi (Oxford University Press, 2010 and HarperCollins, 2015), A Hundred Measures of Time: Nammāḻvār’s Tiruviruttam (Penguin Classics, 2014), Endless Song: Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi (Penguin Classics 2020), and with Crispin Branfoot, Andal’s Garden: Art, Ornament and Devotion in Srivilliputtur (Marg 2016). Her translation of Endless Song received the Lucien Stryk Prize for Asian Translation from the American Literary Translators Association (2021) and the AK Ramanujan Translation Prize from the Association of Asian Studies (2022). She is one of the translators of Kampaṉ’s twelfth century Tamil epic, Irāmāvatāram, for the Murty Classical Library, She served on the editorial board of the Murty Classical Library of India from 2017-2024. In collaboration with noted South Indian classical vocalist, Sikkil Gurucharan, Archana performs her translations guided by the principles of Indic performative and interpretive practices. She served as the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies from July 2015 to June 2018 and again from 2019-2021. In recognition of her research, she was named a UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow, a title she held from 2014-2019. Archana’s research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (for the Tiruvāymoḻi translation), National Endowment for the Humanities, The American Institute of Indian Studies, The American Academy of Religion, and Fulbright. Her personal website is Poetry Makes Worlds (archana.faculty.ucdavis.edu). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.