Prof. Diana L Eck
Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Master of the Lowell House, Harvard University
Prof. Eck’s academic work focuses primarily on India and America and in both cases she is interested in the challenges of religious pluralism in a multi-religious society. Her work on India includes the books - Banaras: City of Light and Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India.
Her other works include: The Pluralism Project's award-winning CD-ROM, On Common Ground: World Religions in America, A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation etc. Her book Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras won the Grawemeyer Book Award in 1995, and a 10th-anniversary edition was published in 2003.
She has received several awards and honors including: National Humanities Award from President Clinton and the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1998, the Montana Governor's Humanities Award in 2003, and the Melcher Lifetime Achievement Award from the Unitarian Universalist Association in 2003.