Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (also Wendy Doniger) is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on Social Thought. She has taught at the University of Chicago since 1978.

Much of her work is focused on translating, interpreting and comparing elements of Hindu mythology through modern contexts of gender, sexuality and identity. She has been called "one of the most distinguished mythologists of our time". Alluding to her Classical training, she has described herself as "a Sanskritist, indeed a recovering Orientalist" and "an old-fashioned philologist".

“As the Hindu gods are 'immortal' only in a very particular sense - for they had born and they die - they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details... and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beigns by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human beign, however 'archetypal' his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are masks behind which we see our own faces.”