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Kevin McGrath

Associate of the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University

Harvard University

Areas of expertise

  • - The Sanskrit epic Mahabharata
  • - Kinship
  • - Landscape
  • - Migration
  • - The Homeric hero as a figure for humanisitic analysis
  • - Poetry of Bronze Age preliterate and premonetary culture

Major works

The Sanskrit Hero (Brill, 2004), Stri (Harvard University Press, 2009), Jaya (Harvard University Press, 2011), Heroic Krsna (Harvard University Press, 2013), Arjuna Pandava (Orient BlackSwan, 2016), Raja Yudhisthira (Cornell University Press, 2017), Bhisma Devavrata (Orient BlackSwan, 2018), Vyasa Redux (Anthem Press, 2019).

About me

Kevin McGrath is an Associate of the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. His research centers on the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata ; he has published eight works on this topic, The Sanskrit Hero, Stri, Jaya, Heroic Krsna, Arjuna Pandava, Raja Yudhisthira , Bhisma Devavrata and Vyasa Redux. McGrath is Poet in Residence at Harvard’s Lowell House, and his most recent publications are Eroica , Supernature , which are both I-Books, and Windward, Eros, _and Song of the Republic. He does fieldwork in the Kacch of Western Gujarat, studying kinship, landscape, and migration; In the Kacch_ , is a personal memoir of this work. The hero as a figure for humanistic analysis is the focus of much of McGrath's scholarly research, particularly as expressed in the poetry of Bronze Age preliterate and premonetary culture.