Donna Marie (Foley) Wulff , Professor Emerita of Indian Religions at Brown University, passed away in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 16, 2025, at age 81.
Donna studied world religions at Oberlin College and was the first woman to enroll in a PhD program in comparative religion at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, and the first PhD candidate in her program to pass her qualifying exams with distinction. Her dissertation, “Drama as a Mode of Religious Realization: The Vidagdhamadhava of Rupa Gosvamin,” was published in 1985.
Donna taught Religions of India at Brown University for 37 years before retiring in 2011. She spearheaded the development of the interdisciplinary South Asian Studies concentration and chaired the South Asia Faculty Group. Donna’s research focused on the lives and struggles of women singers in Bengal, and she spent five years conducting research in India, supported by various fellowships, including an AIIS senior fellowship in 1998-1999 and a Fulbright scholarship. Donna co-edited two books with John Stratton Hawley: The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India (1982) and Devi: Goddesses of India (1996), and she published numerous research articles.
A lifelong fighter for diversity, equity, and inclusion, Donna spent her life merging the personal and political. She was the first female professor in Brown Religious Studies Department. When her daughter Megan was born, she taught her class on Tuesday, gave birth on Wednesday, took Thursday off, and was back to teaching again the following Tuesday. She often told this story not to brag, but to remark on how much things had changed for the better for working women since that time – changes that she herself helped to fight for as the Chair of the Brown Committee on the Status of Women in the late 1980s. Donna was also a strong advocate for greater intercultural diversity in Brown’s curriculum, often speaking out in favor of expanding Brown’s offerings in the humanities to embrace a wider range of cultures and religions. In her retirement, Donna continued to advocate fiercely for positive change in the world.