Diana L. Eck

Diana L. Eck
Born	1945 Bozeman, Montana
Alma mater	Harvard University
Partner(s)	Dorothy Austin
Awards	Unitarian Universalist Melcher Award (1994) and the Grawemeyer Award (1995) for Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras

Diana L. Eck (born 1945 in Bozeman, Montana) is a scholar of religious studies who is Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University, as well as a Master of Lowell House and the Director of The Pluralism Project at Harvard. Among other works, she is the author of Banaras, City of Light, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras, and A New Religious America: How a Christian Country Became the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation. At Harvard, she is in the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, the Committee on the Study of Religion, and is also a member of the Faculty of Divinity. She has been reappointed the chair for the Committee on the Study of Religion, a position which she held from 1990 to 1998. In March 2012, Diana authored her book India: A Sacred Geography.

Raised as a Christian Methodist in Montana, Eck later embraced Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist beliefs about spirituality and now she describes her religious ideals as "interfaith" infrastructures. She has been connected with the World Council of Churches, and Harvard Divinity School.

Eck received her B.A. in Religious Studies from Smith College in 1967, and her M.A. in South Asian History from The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1968. In 1976 she received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in the Comparative Study of Religion.

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