Two young luminaries in our field, David Buchta and Malcolm Keating, have successfully defended their dissertations at Penn and Texas respectively. Let’s all congratulate them! David and Malcolm are, among other things, both Alaṅkārikas (broadly construed), with Malcolm’s dissertation on Mukulabhaṭṭa and pragmatics (as seen here), and David’s on Rūpagosvāmin’s Stavamālā. I’d like to get David and our own Andrew Ollett in the same room at some point.
Congratulations David and Malcolm and all best wishes for many succesful future researches! Perhaps you might want to inaugurate a new tradition on this blog and present here in short your dissertation’s topic?
congratulations both! and i’d like to second elisa’s request that you give us the opportunity to think about and talk about your work here. (david and i were in the same room once, as i recall, but the topic was nāgeśa’s paramalaghumañjūṣā…)
Thanks, Matt and everyone else! I’d be happy to submit a post in a week or so when things settle down. In the meantime, my website has a summary of my research as well as links to pre-prints of my articles in History of Philosophy Quarterly and Journal of Indian Philosophy. I tend to think of my work as at the intersection of alaṅkāra and philosophy and I’m interested in making room for more contemporary philosophical work that draws on alaṅkāra and Mīmāṃsā, especially in pragmatics, though I’m sure there are connections beyond that.