From poetry, to India, to religion and performance, to Indian religious poetry in performance, the trajectory of Linda’s creative interests and career have led to her current work on the fifteenth-century Indian mystical poet Kabir–his presence in oral as well as written traditions, and the musical forms and social contexts of Kabir’s poetry in India today.

Linda is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, where she has taught for fifteen years. Publications include Singing Emptiness: Kumar Gandharva Performs the Poetry of Kabir (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2009); “Fighting Over Kabir’s Dead Body,” in From Ancient to Modern: Religion, Power, and Community in North India, ed. Ishita Banerjee and Saurabh Dube (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009); “Ramlila: The Audience Experience,” in The Life of Hinduism, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); The Bijak of Kabir, trans. Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh, essays and notes by Linda Hess (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); “Lovers’ Doubts: Questioning the Tulsī Rāmāyaṇa,” in Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition, ed. Paula Richman (Berkeley: University of California Press, & New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000); “Rejecting Sita: Indians Respond to the Ideal Man’s Cruel Treatment of His Ideal Wife,” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion (1999) 67:1: 1-32.