Alf Hiltebeitel

Alf Hiltebeitel is Columbian Professor of Religion, History, and Human Sciences at George Washington University in Washington DC, USA. His academic specialism is in ancient Sanskrit epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana, together with Indian religious tradition and folklore.

Hiltebeitel was awarded a B.A. degree from Haverford College, where he majored in religion and took a minor in English between 1959-1963. From 1964 until 1968 he attended the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he obtained an M.A. on the history of religions in 1966 and later, in 1973, a Ph.D. with a thesis titled Gods, Heroes, and Krsna: A Study of the Mahabharata in relation to Indian and Indo-European Symbolisms.

Hiltebeitel was an editorial assistant for Seabury Press in New York City during 1963-1964, and between 1967-1968 he held a similar post with the History of Religions Journal. He was appointed an Assistant Professor in Religion at George Washington University (GWU) in 1968, and was promoted to Associate Professor there in 1974. His appointment as Professor in Religion at GWU came in 1981. In the years following he has delivered invitational lectures at universities such as The Sorbonne and the University of Wisconsin, as well as working on academic programs in south India.

He has been Editor-in-chief of Hinduism for Oxford Bibliographies Online since 2009, and Editor-in-chief of the India's Sanskrit Epics: Text and Tradition series for Motilal Banarsidass publishers, as of 2015^[update].

Among his many awards have been a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.

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