Paul B. Courtright was Professor Emeritus of Religion and Asian Studies at Emory University. During his long and distinguished career, he published and taught on Hindu marriage, pilgrimage traditions, and the religious landscape of British colonial India. Paul had previously taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he also served as department chair, and at Williams College.
Paul first traveled to India in 1963 and returned there after finishing his BA at Grinnell College, serving as Assistant Rector at Ahmednagar College in Maharashtra in 1964-65. He came back to the US to complete an M.Div. degree at Yale University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1974.
Paul was a visionary administrator. He came to Emory University in 1989 as chair of its Religion Department. During his years as chair (1989-1996), he worked to expand its faculty and diversify its Graduate Division of Religion. He helped to found Emory’s Ph.D. program in West and South Asian Religions (WSAR), whose graduates soon began to populate the field, establishing Emory as one of the premier doctoral programs for the study of religion in the US. His students and the junior faculty who served under him will remember Paul as the most generous and supportive of mentors. He was also instrumental in strengthening the Emory-Tibet Partnership, which continues to flourish.
Paul was the author of Gaṇeśa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings (1985) and co-editor with Lindsey Harlan of From the Margins of Hindu Marriage: Essays in Gender, Culture and Religion (1995). He spent much of his career engaged deeply in the study of satī and its place in the Indian and colonial imaginaries. His manuscript in progress, The Goddess and the Dreadful Practice, is expected to be published posthumously.
Paul was the recipient of an AIIS senior fellowship in 2001 and he served AIIS as a trustee for Emory for many years.