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Peter Valdina

Peter Valdina is a doctoral candidate in the West and South Asian Religions program of the Graduate Division of Religion. He graduated from Hamilton College and has two master's degrees, one in religion from Columbia University and the other in psychoanalytic studies from the New School for Social Research.

In his dissertation, he argues that colonial translations of a Sanskrit text on yoga are central to understanding the history of contemporary Hinduism. He examines a set of translators working in nineteenth-century Calcutta who adapted the Yogasutra to the linguistic registers of Hindi, Bengali, and English. The process of translation transformed yoga: some translators argued for yoga's global and universal relevance, others linked it directly to the local and specific contexts in which they wrote and translated. Translation, with its unstable relation to notions of authenticity, originality, loss, and afterlife, serves as the theoretical model by which the transformation of yoga during the colonial period can be understood.

As a tutor, Peter enjoys helping with the brainstorming process, finding links in arguments, and figuring out ways to make things hang together.

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