Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her 2001 play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2002; Parks is the first African American woman to achieve this honor for drama.
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include, Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978. She served as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1998.
Lan Samantha Chang, born 1965, is an American writer of novels and short stories. She is Professor of English at the University of Iowa and Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Kimiko Hahn is an American poet and distinguished professor in the MFA program of Queens College, CUNY. Her work frequently deals with the reinvention of poetic forms and the intersecting of conflicting identities.
Meribeth Elliott Cameron was an American historian of China and academic who served as the 14th (Acting) President of Mount Holyoke College from 1968-1969.
Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Sr. was the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University.
Mary Jo Salter is an American poet, a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and a professor in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University.
Leah Blatt Glasser is an American literary critic and Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman scholar at Mount Holyoke College. She was Dean of First-Year Studies and is currently a Lecturer in English at Mount Holyoke College. Her former student would later credit Glasser with her success.
Mary Williamson McHenry is "credited with bringing African-American literature to Mount Holyoke College," where she is Emeritus Professor of English. McHenry also introduced her then student, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, to Five Colleges faculty member James Baldwin during the 1980s. Parks would later credit McHenry with her success.
Nellie Yvonne McKay was an American academic and author who was the Evjue-Bascom Professor of American and African-American Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also taught in English and women's studies, and is best known as the co-editor of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature.
Satya Vrat Shastri is a highly decorated Sanskrit scholar, writer, grammarian and poet from India. He has written three Mahakavyas, three Khandakavyas, one Prabandhakavyas and one Patrakavya and five works in critical writing in Sanskrit. His important works are Ramakirtimahakavyam, Brahattaram Bharatam, Sribodhisattvacharitam, Vaidika Vyakarana, Sarmanyadesah Sutram Vibhati, and "Discovery of Sanskrit Treasures" in seven volumes.
Jane Marcus (1938–2015) was a pioneering feminist literary scholar, specializing in women writers of the Modernist era, but especially in the social and political context of their writings. Focusing on Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Nancy Cunard, among many others, she devised groundbreaking analyses of Woolf's writings, upending a generation of criticism that ignored feminist, pacifist, and socialist themes in much of Woolf's work and critique of imperialism and bourgeois society. Marcus's understanding of Woolf's place within the larger context of English literature has become prevailing wisdom today in the fields affected by her theorization and research, despite the controversial nature of her positions when they were originally formulated and how much opposition she garnered from earlier scholars and critics.
Pier Maria (P.M.) Pasinetti was a novelist, professor and journalist.
Barbara Stoler Miller was a scholar of Sanskrit literature. Her translation of the Bhagavad Gita was extremely successful and she helped popularize Indian literature in the U.S. She was the president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1990.
Marilyn Chin (陈美玲) is a prominent Chinese American poet and writer, an activist and feminist, an editor and Professor of English. She is well-represented in major canonical anthologies and textbooks and her work is taught all over the world. Marilyn Chin's work is a frequent subject of academic research
and literary criticism. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress.
Karen E. Rowe is an American literary critic and a specialist in Renaissance literature. She is a professor of English at UCLA.
Nalini Balbir is a French Indologist who lives in Paris. She is a scholar of Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism. She was a direct student of Indologist Colette Caillat. She is known for her work on the publication of the Catalogue of the Jain Manuscripts of the British Library published by the Institute of Jainology.
Nina Baym (1936–2018) was an American literary critic and literary historian. She was professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1963 to 2004.
Panna Naik is an Indian Gujarati language poet and story writer who has lived in Philadelphia, United States since 1960. Working in the local university, she wrote poetry drawn from the world around her. Her book Pravesh (1975) received critical acclaim and she has published several poetry collections since.
