Brockington, J.L. 1940- (John Leonard Brockington)

PERSONAL:

Born December 5, 1940, in Oxford, England; son of L.H. (a university teacher and minister) and F.E. Brockington; married Mary Fairweather (a researcher), August 2, 1966; children: Anne, Michael. Ethnicity: "British." Education: Corpus Christi College, Oxford, B.A. (with honors), 1963, M.A., 1966, Ph.D., 1968.

ADDRESSES:

Office—c/o School of Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh, 7 Buccleuch Pl., Edinburgh EH8 9LW, Scotland; fax: 651-1258. E-mail—j.l.brockington@ed.ac.uk.

CAREER:

University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, assistant lecturer, 1965-67, lecturer, 1967-82, senior lecturer, 1982-89, reader, 1989-98, professor of Sanskrit, 1998-2005, professor emeritus, 2005—, director of studies, 1969-75, department head, 1975-98, convenor of Centre for South Asian Studies, 1989-93, head of School of Asian Studies, 1998-99. Guest lecturer at numerous institutions in England and elsewhere, including Cambridge University, Utkal University, Sri Jagannatha Sanskrit University, University of Calcutta, University of Zagreb, Jadavpur University, and Kyoto University; participant in international conferences. Member of editorial board, "Hindu Studies Series" published by Routledge, and Indologica Taurinensia, Jagannāth Jyotih, Religions of South Asia, and Cosmos.

MEMBER:

International Association of Sanskrit Studies (secretary general, 2000—), Traditional Cosmology Society, Royal Society of Edinburgh (fellow).

WRITINGS:

The Sacred Thread: Hinduism in Its Continuity and Diversity, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1981, 2nd edition, 1996.

Righteous Rāma: The Evolution of an Epic, Oxford University Press (Delhi, India), 1985.

Hinduism and Christianity, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1992.

(Compiler, with P. Flamm, Heinrich von Stietencron, and others) Epic and Purānic Bibliography: Up to 1985, Purāna Research Publications (Tübingen, Germany), 1992.

The Sanskrit Epics, E.J. Brill (Leiden, Netherlands), 1998.

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Sanskrit and Other Indian Manuscripts of the Chandra Shum Shere Collection in the Bodleian Library, Part 2: Epics and Purānas, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1999.

Epic Threads: John Brockington on the Sanskrit Epics, edited by Greg Bailey and wife, Mary Brockington, Oxford University Press (Delhi, England), 2000.

(Editor, with Danuta Stasik) Indian Epic Traditions—Past and Present, Rocznik Orientalistyczny (Warsaw, Poland), 2002.

(Editor, with Anna S. King) The Intimate Other: Love Divine in Indic Religions, Orient Longman (Delhi, India), 2005.

(Translator, with Mary Brockington) Rāma the Steadfast: An Early Form of the Rāmāyana Penguin Classics (London, England), 2006.

Contributor to books, including World Mythology, edited by Roy Willis, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1993; The Concept of Race in South Asia, edited by Peter Robb, Oxford University Press (Delhi, India), 1995; The Impeachment of Warren Hastings: Papers from a Bicentenary Commemoration, edited by Geoffrey Carnall and Colin Nicholson, Edinburgh University Press, 1998; Yoga: The Indian Tradition, edited by Ian Whicher and David Carpenter, RoutledgeCurzon (New York, NY), 2003; and reference books. Contributor of dozens of articles and reviews to learned journals, including Journal of the Oriental Institute, Journal of the Asiatic Society, Journal of Vaishnava Studies, Journal of Indian Philosophy, and Journal of the American Oriental Society.

SIDELIGHTS:

J.L. Brockington once told CA: "My research so far has been concerned mainly with the Rāmāyana, the Purānas, and the development of Vaisnavism. I collaborated for several years with the Tübingen Purāna Project of the Seminar für Indologie und vergleichende Religionswissenschaft at the University of Tübingen. In 1984 I was invited by the Sahitya Akademi in New Delhi to participate in the critical inventory of Rāmāyana studies throughout the world by compiling information on holdings of manuscripts and other materials relating to any version of the Rāmāyana located in Britain.

"I am continuing my studies on textual problems of the Rāmāyana, and I am also widening my epic research, with studies on the Rāmāyana tradition in India and the rest of Asia, and on the Mahābhārata and the Harivamśa."