Robert Yelle

Assistant Professor

Office: 143 Mitchell
Telephone: 901.678.2540
Fax: 901.678.2720
E-mail: robertyelle@hotmail.com
Education: Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2002
CV: http://www.memphis.edu/history/pdfs/cv_yelle.pdf (pdf)

Fields of interest

Classical and colonial South Asian history; history of religions; Hinduism and Buddhism; the British Reformation and secularization; legal history; philosophy of history

Most of my work as an historian of religions has focused on three topics: religious ritual as a mode of communication or rhetoric; the historical and structural relations between law and religion; and secularization or “disenchantment” as an historical process in the evolution of religion and society. My first book, Explaining Mantras, considered the question of what makes ritual language efficacious through a reading of the Hindu ritual texts known as the Tantras. My current book project, The Disenchantment of Language, examines the impact of the British Reformation, both at home and in colonial India, on theories of language and language practices. Protestant iconoclasm, in coordination with print culture, inspired attacks on oral custom, myth, and poetic ritual language, contributing to the opening of secular modernity as a space opposed to these traditional religious forms.

Courses taught

Classical Indian History (University of Toronto); Law and Religion in India and the West (University of Toronto); Theories of Religion (University of Illinois); Asian Philosophy (Southern Illinois University); Philosophy of Language (Southern Illinois University)

Representative publications

• Co-editor, with Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, After Secular Law (Stanford University Press, forthcoming)
• “Punishing Puns: Etymology as Linguistic Ideology in Hindu and British Traditions.” In Essays in Honor of Patrick Olivelle, ed. Steven Lindquist (Florence, Italy: Florence University Press, forthcoming).
• “Hindu Law as Performance: Ritual and Poetic Elements in Dharmashastra.” In Law and Hinduism: An Introduction, ed. Donald Davis, Jr., Jayanth Krishnan, and Timothy Lubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, under contract).
• Explaining Mantras: Ritual, Rhetoric, and the Dream of a Natural Language in Hindu Tantra (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
• “The Trouble with Transcendence: Carl Schmitt’s ‘Exception’ as a Challenge for Religious Studies,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 184-201.
• “The Hindu Moses: Christian Polemics against Jewish Ritual and the Secularization of Hindu Law under Colonialism,” History of Religions 49 (2009): 141-71.
• “The Rhetoric of Gesture in Cross-Cultural Perspective.” In Paul Bouissac, ed., “Gesture, Ritual and Memory,” Gesture 6 (2006): 223-40.
• “Law’s Trouble with Images: Fetishism and Seduction from Athens and Jerusalem to Madison Avenue.” In Images in Law, ed. Anne Wagner and William Pencak (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 267-79.
• “To Perform or Not to Perform?: A Theory of Ritual Performance versus Cognitive Theories of Religious Transmission.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 18 (2006): 372-91.
• “Bentham’s Fictions: Canon and Idolatry in the Genealogy of Law.” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 17 (2005): 151-79.
• “Images of Law and its Others: Canon and Idolatry in the Discourses of British India.” Culture and Religion 6 (2005): 181-99.
• “Ritual and Religious Language.” In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, second revised edition (Elsevier, 2005).
• (With Winnifred Fallers Sullivan.) “Law and Religion: An Overview.” In Encyclopedia of Religion, second edition (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005), 5325-5332.
• “Poetic Justice: Rhetoric in Hindu Ordeals and Legal Formulas.” Religion 32 (2002): 259-72.
• “Rhetorics of Law and Ritual: A Semiotic Comparison of the Law of Talion and Sympathetic Magic.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69 (2001): 627-47.
• “The Rebirth of Myth?: Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and its Romantic Antecedents.” Numen 47 (2000): 175-202.