Hillary A. Langberg

Primary Academic Program: Religion

Biography:

Professor Langberg specializes in Asian cultures and languages, with research interests ranging from goddess cultures in India and South Asian art and archaeology to Buddhist iconography and tantric studies. She earned her doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, where her dissertation addressed “Invoking the Goddess: The Role of Female Deities in Mahāyāna Indian Buddhism of the Middle Period (ca. second to seventh centuries CE.” Select conference papers include “Early Tantric Buddhism and Bodhisattva-Goddess Ontology: Tārā in the Mañjuśriyamūlakalpa” (American Oriental Society, Chicago); “Navigating Erosion and Erasure in a Comparative Analysis of Buddhist Ritual Families (mantra kulas) in Texts and Stone Sculpture” (Conference on South Asia, Madison, Wisconsin); and “Transformations of Perception: The Presentation of Multi-locative Ritual Space in the Mañjuvajra Maṇḍala, an Eleventh-Century Pāla Period Sculpture from Bengal” (University of Oslo). She has served as teaching assistant and visiting or adjunct lecturer at Huston-Tillotson University and in several departments at UT Texas. She has conversational and/or reading proficiency in Sanskrit, Hindi, French, and German.

BA, University of California, Berkeley; MA, PhD, University of Texas at Austin. At Bard since 2020.