Hidden Stories Doctoral Fellow, PhD Candidate, University of Toronto BA Asian Area Studies, UBC; MA Asian Studies, UBC Email: kathryn.geddes at mail.utoronto.ca   Hidden Stories - Project Areas of Activity Kashmir and the Indus Valley Book Science Research Interests South Asian religions Sanskrit literature and poetics Gender, sexuality, and affect South Asian Manuscript studies

Biography

I am a scholar of South Asian religions and am currently a doctoral candidate at the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. My dissertation, tentatively titled “Writing Avadāna for the Court: Poetry, Power, and Wonder in Śivasvāmin’s Kapphiṇābhyudaya,” investigates how a religious narrative about a king’s encounter with the Buddha was recast in an erudite Sanskrit poem known as the Kapphiṇābhyudaya, or the Rise of Kapphiṇa. Exploring how features of this narrative were brought into several understudied poetic structures of the Kapphiṇābhyudaya, my research reveals how religious discourse made its way into the courtly poetry of early medieval Kashmir. As a scholar of Sanskrit, my research interests centre around the religious history of Kashmir, Sanskrit literature, and reception history. However, I am also more broadly interested in practices of reading, gender and sexuality, and manuscript studies. My work with the Hidden Stories projects centres around re-contextualising and providing support for work with birch bark manuscripts from Kashmir.