It is with special pride that we announce that Ms. Vishnupriya Goswami has won the UW Graduate School’s 2026 Distinguished Thesis Award (Humanities & Fine Arts). Ms. Goswami entered the graduate program in the department of Asian Languages and Literature in 2024. She came to us with a BA with Honors in History from the University of Delhi and with work experience at the National Museum and for the prestigious Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). For the latter, she authored a well-written coffee table book on the Krishna devotional theater of Rāsa-līlā as performed in the area she grew up in, Vrindaban, Uttar Pradesh.
For her MA thesis, she focuses on the theme of disguise and cross-dressing from a non-western religious perspective in a popular Rāsa-līlā play Mudariyā Corī Līlā (“The Theft of the Ring”), performed annually during Krishna’s birthday season in pilgrimage centers in North India. During the summer and Autumn 2025, she carried out fieldwork in India, witnessing the plays and visiting libraries, where she has discovered print and manuscript material to bring historical depth and a comparative perspective to her study.
Importantly, her scholarly work is well-balanced by her own practice of performing arts, not in Rāsa-līlā, which is exclusively practiced by males, but a related Eastern Indian dance style, Odissi. This lends an experiential aspect to her scholarship. Ms. Goswami is a multiple award-winning Odissi dancer who has performed internationally (India, South Korea, Australia, Canada) and on Indian television (Doordarshan). Since coming to UW, she has performed here, doing outreach via lecture-demonstrations. She published her Sanskrit class paper of a dancer’s perception of the famous twelfth-century dance drama Gītagovinda in UW’s Manifold The Indian Song Journal. This outreach has already benefited the profile of our department. We are delighted her extraordinary work has been rewarded by this official UW recognition. Congratulations Vishnupriya!
