Elinor Gadon

Areas of Expertise

History of Art; History of Religion; Cultural Anthropology; South Asia Area Studies; Women’s Studies

Email: egadon@brandeis.edu

Current Project

Elinor will be working on a book based upon her travels to India to the village of Orissa.

Biography

Elinor Gadon is a cultural historian whose research interests and publications are focused on the analysis of myth and image in their cultural context as they affect issues of gender. Her academic training, teaching and publication are both interdisciplinary – in art history, history of religions and cultural anthropology – as well as multi-cultural. Her specialty is the art and culture of the Indian subcontinent.

Her major publication, The Once and Future Goddess: A Symbol for Our Time, is a visual chronicle of the history of the sacred female and her re-emergence in the cultural mythology of our time. She is currently working on two projects for publication – the completion of a comprehensive study of the mythology of the masculine in American culture. The second is a socio-cultural analysis of the village goddess in India based on five seasons of fieldwork in Orissa. She has taught at the Harvard Divinity School, Tufts University, University of California, Santa Barbara and Mills College where she was an Associate Scholar in the Women’s Leadership Program. She developed and directed an M.A. and Ph.D. in Women’s Spirituality at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

Education

Ph.D., University of Chicago

M.A., University of Massachusetts

B.A., University of Michigan

Representative Publications

Gadon, Elinor. The Once and Future Goddess: A Symbol for Our Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

Links

Curriculum Vitae