Brian Collins

Brian Collins lives with his wife, daughter, and tuxedo cat in Athens, Ohio, where is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy and associate professor of World Religions at Ohio University. Since 2013 he has been teaching classes at OHIO on Hinduism, Buddhism, Mythology, Yoga, and "The Global Occult: Ghosts, Demonology, and the Paranormal in World Religions."

Over the course of earning his PhD with his mentor Wendy Doniger at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he became a specialist in Hindu epics with a deep interest in comparing mythologies across cultures. Since then, Prof. Collins has published research on sacrificial violence, the history of the history of religions, the psychoanalytic study of myth, and (sometimes) Bollywood horror movies.

He is the author of two monographs on Hindu mythology. The first, inspired by the "mimetic theory" of René Girard, is The Head Beneath the Altar: Hindu Mythology and the Critique of Sacrifice (Michigan State University Press, 2014) and focuses on the mythological life of the Vedic ritual world. The second, The Other Rama: Matricide and Genocide in the Mythology of Paraśurāma (SUNY Press, 2020) is a psychoanalytic study of the myth cycle of Paraśurāma, best known for decapitating his mother and murdering the entire warrior class for twenty-one generations.

He has also written a lengthy biographical afterword for a new Italian translation (Adelphi Edizioni, 2019) of the 1951 book Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy by the unjustly forgotten Austrian polymath Robert Eisler. He is working on a podcast about Eisler's remarkable life and work in an attempt to bring this remarkable man out of obscurity.

He likes books, records, and vegan oil-free cooking and thinks everyone should read The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, and The Ruin of Kasch by Roberto Calasso.