John Stratton Hawley, is the author or editor of some fifteen books, most of them having to do with Hinduism and the religions of India. He has served as director of Columbia’s Southern Asian Institute; has received multiple awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian, and the American Institute of Indian Studies; and has been a Guggenheim Fellow. He has explored the worship of Krishna and his consort Radha in a series of works including At Play with Krishna, Krishna, the Butter Thief, and The Divine Consort, the latter edited with Donna Wulff. Hawley has worked with other scholars on a series of edited volumes. Some of these concern India - Sati: The Blessing and the Curse, Devi: Goddesses of India, and most recently The Life of Hinduism, a students’ guide to Hinduism as a lived tradition co-edited with Vasudha Narayanan. Other volumes Hawley has edited are comparative in nature - one on religious exemplitude (Saints and Virtues), another on Fundamentalism and Gender. Gender also emerges as a major theme in Hawley’s most recent co-edited book (with Kimberley Patton), called Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination. Two current projects point in different directions. One is firmly Indian: how did we come to have the common-sensical idea that something called “the bhakti movement” was a major force in the religious history of South Asia? God’s Vacation explores three religious utopias in the United States - one Hindu, one Buddhist, and one Protestant Christian - and asks about the special relationship that binds religion to memory and retreat.