February 16, 2026
Daniel (Dan) Gold, Emeritus Professor of Asian Studies at Cornell University, died on
February 16, 2026 in Ithaca. He had research specializations in old Hindi poetry, early
modern North Indian devotional cultures, and contemporary religious life.
Dan was born in Newark and grew up in Los Angeles. He earned a BA in Slavic languages
and Latin from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968. After graduation, he joined
the Peace Corps, training teachers of English in India, an experience which led him to
pursue graduate study at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he received his
PhD in 1982.
Gold taught at Vassar College and Oberlin College and was a Mellon Fellow for one year at
Stanford University before joining the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell 1986. He
taught at Cornell for 35 years, until his retirement in 2021. He served as Chair of the
Department of Asian Studies and was twice the Director of the South Asia Program.
Gold was the author of four books: Provincial Hinduism: Religion and Community in
Gwalior City (2015), Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion: Modern Fascinations
(2003), Comprehending the Guru: Toward a Grammar of Religious Perception (1988), The
Lord as Guru: Hindi Sants in North Indian Tradition (1987). He also produced these
documentaries set in Gwalior: “Living Above Hippopotamus Street: Religion and
Community” (2006), and “Being Sindhi in Central India: Religion, Community, Identity”
(2007).
In addition to his books and films, Gold contributed to the field many book chapters and
articles, continuing to research and publish into the last months of his life. He was twice a
Society for the Humanities fellow at Cornell. He held fellowships from the Fulbright
Foundation, AIIS, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He traveled to India
frequently for fieldwork, often with his wife, Ann Grodzins Gold, a professor of
anthropology and religion at Syracuse University.
For Gold, personal devotion and scholarly pursuits were interconnected. Gold discovered
meditation while in the Peace Corps, and continued for the rest of his life. He brought his
knowledge and practice to Cornell through one of the popular courses he taught,
“Meditation in Indian Culture.”