About

Whitney Cox is a faculty member in the South Asian Languages and Civilizations department at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the history, literature, and political thought of medieval South Asia, with a particular emphasis on Sanskrit and Tamil textual sources. Cox's work combines history, theory, and close textual analysis to explore the nature of political society in pre-modern India, as exemplified in her study of the contested accession of Kulottunga I, ruler of the imperial Chola dynasty. This research offers a fundamental re-imagining of South Asian social, political, and cultural history, as well as religion and comparative political thought. Cox also investigates philology in classical South Asia, demonstrating how pseudepigraphical genres such as Sanskrit purāṇas and tantras incorporated modes of philological reading and writing. Her scholarship traces the transformation of philological methods through the works of key figures like the dramaturgist Śāradātanaya, the Vaiṣṇava poet-theologian Veṅkaṭanātha, and the Śaiva mystic Maheśvarānanda. Her interdisciplinary approach combines close textual analysis with broader theoretical concerns, contributing to a deeper understanding of literary and intellectual history in South Asia. In addition to her monographs, Cox has contributed to collaborative essays that examine India's literary cultures and their role in global literary theory, focusing on themes such as allusion, poetics, storytelling, and translation. Her work engages with a wide range of topics including literary criticism, epistemic complexity, and historical consciousness in South Asian texts, reflecting a commitment to revitalizing the field of Indology through rigorous textual study and innovative theoretical frameworks.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Theology
• Literature
• History
• Linguistics
• Art
• Computer Science
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Sanskrit Poetics through Dandin’s Looking Glass

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Philosophy
  • Art

  Abstract This chapter narrates the history of Sanskrit poetic theory (Alaṅkāraśāstra) from the perspective of Dandin’s Mirror of Literature (Kāvyādarśa). It begins with a brief discussion of Dandin’s predecessors and their potential influence on him. Then follows an analysis of Dandin’s reception in Kashmir, home to a series of theorists who dominated the field of poetics beginning in the eighth century. The heart of the chapter is dedicated to Dandin’s most significant commentator, the tenth-century Sinhalese Buddhist monk Ratnashrijnana. It shows how this commentator responded to and extended fundamental aspects of the Mirror such as its openness and modularity. The chapter also shows Ratnashrijnana as steeped in both the world of Sanskrit court literati and that of the Buddhist community and its literature and values. The chapter concludes by the responses to the Mirror by a host of later medieval and early modern thinkers, most significantly King Bhoja (r. ca. 1010–1055) and Appayya Dikshita (ca. 1520–1592).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Bhaṭṭa Jayanta on Epistemic Complexity

  Journal of Indian Philosophy · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Epistemology
  • Philosophy
  • Linguistics
  PublisherDOI

• Reading Jalhaṇa Reading Bilhaṇa

  Journal of the American Oriental Society · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Literature
  • History

  
 
 
 The Sūktimuktāvalī, an anthology compiled in 1258 CE, is by far the most important source of testimonia for Bilhaṇa’s biographical mahākāvya, the Vikramāṅkadevacarita, composed ca. 1085. While the anthology’s value for the primary textual criticism of the kāvya is limited, its value for its interpretation is considerable: Bilhaṇa is the anthology’s most frequently cited poet, and its selection of his verses amounts to a reading of the poem as a whole. The recovery of this interpretation also provides the opportunity to consider the anthology’s complex authorship and to situate it within the late medieval literary cultural history of western India.
 
 

  PublisherDOI

• Trouble at the “Crossroads”: Divisions over the Use of Religious Symbols as AIDS Memorials in Houston, 1991

  Journal of the History of Sexuality · 2020-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Using microwave thermal ablation to develop a subtotal, cortical-sparing approach to the management of primary aldosteronism

  International Journal of Hyperthermia · 2019-01-01 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access

  Objective: To investigate the feasibility and efficacy of localized, subtotal, cortical-sparing microwave thermal ablation (MTA) as a potential curative management for primary aldosteronism. The study investigated with equal importance the selected ablation of small volumes of adrenal cortex while sparing adjacent cortex.Method: An in-vivo study was carried out in swine (n = 8) where MTA was applied under direct visualization, to the adrenal glands at 45 W or 70 W for 60 s, using a lateral, side-firing probe and a non-penetrative approach. Animals were survived for 48 h post-procedurally. Animals were investigated for markers of histological, immunohistochemical and biochemical evidence of adrenal function and adrenal damage by assessing samples drawn intra-operatively and at the time of euthanasia.Results: Selected MTA (70 W for 60 s) successfully ablated small adrenocortical volumes (∼0.8 cm3) characterized by coagulative necrosis and abnormal expression of functional markers (CYP11B1 and CYP17). Non-ablated, adjacent cortex was not affected and preserved normal expression of functional markers, without increased expression of markers of heat damage (HSP-70 and HMGB-1). Limited adrenal medullary damage was demonstrated histologically, clinically and biochemically.Conclusion: MTA offers potential as an efficient methodology for delivering targeted subtotal cortical-sparing adrenal ablation. Image-guided targeted MTA may also represent a safe future modality for curative management of PA, in the setting of both unilateral and bilateral disease.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Rock Art, Cyclical Time, and Native American Religion: How Mesoamerican Concepts of Death and Rebirth Permeate the Rock Art of the American Southwest

  The 84th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology · 2019-01-01

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Prologue

  2019-08-29

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Extract the indologist can seem like a solitary figure. The scholar of classical India's textual legacy, at least one working in North America,1 tends to appear alone, in the front of the classroom, on the title page, or on the masthead of her article. The model is a heroic one: the sole scholar, emerging from her office or the library to deliver a lecture or to send off the draft of an article or monograph. The structures of blind peer-review and of tenure and promotion committees across the profession all work to reinforce this. But it isn't all lonely work. We have our university colleagues, former teachers, and fellow-students and—if we're lucky—pupils of our own with whom we can share ideas. Online fora and email allow for the frictionless dissemination of research, enabling a scholar to share sources, data, interpretations, and new research questions at any time and from anywhere. But the annual conference endures as a premiere form of academic sociability and exchange. Within this admittedly specialist field, there are relatively few options on offer: to continue to be parochially American, there are perhaps four such conferences the professional Indologist can choose from each year. Being based in the Midwest (and a lazy man), I usually attend the annual South Asia Conference at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; early-career job aspirants and institutionally responsible senior scholars gravitate toward the American Academy of Religion or the Association of Asian Studies. But the crucial forum for most of this volume's participants is the annual meeting of the American Oriental Society. It was at the two hundred and twenty-fifth such meeting, in New Orleans in March 2015, that Stephanie Jamison presented the paper "Houses, Housewives, and Householders," the descendant of which opens the present volume.

  PublisherDOI

• Microwave ablation of the adrenal gland for treatment of functioning adrenocortical tumours: porcine in vivo study

  Endocrine Abstracts · 2019-05-01

  article

  Searchable abstracts of presentations at key conferences in endocrinology ISSN 1470-3947 (print) | ISSN 1479-6848 (online)

  PublisherDOI

• LibGuides: Roosevelt-Perry Elementary Library: Welcome

  2018-04-19

  libguides1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Politics, Kingship, and Poetry in Medieval South India

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2016-10-25 · 8 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In this compelling new study, Whitney Cox presents a fundamental re-imagining of the politics of pre-modern India through the reinterpretation of the contested accession of Kulottunga I (r.1070–1120) as the ruler of the imperial Chola dynasty. By focusing on this complex event and its ramifications over time, Cox traces far-reaching transformations throughout the kingdom and beyond. Through a methodologically innovative combination of history, theory and the close reading of a rich series of Sanskrit and Tamil textual sources, Cox reconstructs the nature of political society in medieval India. A major intervention in the fields of South Asian social, political and cultural history, religion and comparative political thought, this book poses fresh comparative and conceptual questions about politics, history, agency and representation in the pre-modern world.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Yigal Bronner

  4 shared

• Lawrence McCrea

  Cornell University

  3 shared

• Vincenzo Vergiani

  University of Cambridge

  2 shared

• Kim Cox

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, South Asian Languages and Civilizations

  University of Chicago

  2006

Awards & honors

• Fulbright-Hays
• the British Academy
• the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council
• fellow in the Franke Institute for the Humanities
• fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew Unive…