Rebecca J. Manring earned her PhD in Asian Languages and Literatures (Sanskrit, Bengali and Hindi) from the University of Washington in 1995 and has taught Sanskrit, Indian literature, and South Asian religions at Indiana University since 1996. Manring is the author of Reconstructing Tradition: Advaita Acarya and Gaudiya Vaisnavism at the Cusp of the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2005); The Fading Light of Advaita Acarya: Three Hagiographies (Oxford University Press, 2011); and the Catalogue for the Sukumar Sen (Barddhaman Sahitya Sabha) Manuscript Collection (Resources for Scholarship on Asia, 2006). She is currently working on a translation of the 17th century Middle Bengali epic, Dharma Mangala, by Ruparama Chakravarti.