CPR alum and religion major Jef Pierce successfully defended his PhD dissertation at UVA today. Here is some info from his page on the UVA dept website:
Jef’s Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Exaltation of the Goddess: Narrative Expressions of the Feminine Divine in the Devīpurāṇa,” focuses on a subgroup of medieval devotional texts in which the Goddess is for the first time acknowledged as supreme within the Sanskrit Brahmanical milieu. By considering the intertextual relationships of the previously untranslated Devīpurāṇa – a foundational and influential Śākta text – and by drawing out the Tantric elements of the work, his research demonstrates the ways in which the text inherits an orthodox narrative vocabulary but reinvents it for an innovative vision of reality colored by local/indigenous considerations of the powerful feminine divine.