Dr. Lynna Dhanani obtained her doctorate from Yale University and joined the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis, in 2020 as an assistant professor of religious studies.  She is currently working on her first major monograph, tentatively titled “Authority and Wonder: The Devotional Worlds of Hemacandra and Other Medieval Gujarati Hymn-makers”.  Her research explores the confluence of interreligious polemics, philosophical debates, devotional themes, and poetics in the Sanskrit hymns of the celebrated 12th-century Svetambara Jain, Hemacandra, a court pandit to two Hindu kings of medieval Gujarat.  Having dedicated herself to the study of multiple Indian religions for more than two decades, Dr. Dhanani has a wide range of interests, including Jainism, Sanskrit and Prakrit languages and literature, Indian philosophy and aesthetics, yoga, tantra, and especially South Asian religious art.

In 2023, she co-curated an exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum called “Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings”, and is currently a co-author for the exhibition book.  As a recipient of the Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellowship (2022–23) and as part of the “Entanglements of Indian Pasts” project, she has shared her work on the great 20th-century Jain scholar Muni Jambuvijaya and his manuscript preservation projects.  In 2022, she was the main organizer of the field-defining conference “Beyond Boundaries: In Honor of John E. Cort”, which brought together numerous scholars in honor of Dr. Cort, a prolific scholar in the fields of Jain and South Asian studies.

Dr. Dhanani’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring the diversity of Jain hymns produced in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Apabhramsha languages in 11th–13th century Gujarat by the polymath Hemacandra and his contemporaries; the objective is to understand better their perceptions of the broader religious and intellectual worlds in which they flourished and their relationship with religious centers and the royal courts.  In this context, she is exploring several libraries across north-west India and engaging local scholars, Jain communities, and Indian institutions in order to collect and analyze these hymns.  This work will inform her first book manuscript as well as other publications.