Rosane Rocher


Rosane Rocher is a leading historian of Indology and a Professor Emerita of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Born Rosane Debels in Mouscron, Belgium, on 10 August 1937, she earned MAs in Classics in 1959 and in Indo-Iranian studies in 1961, and a PhD in Sanskrit linguistics in 1965 at the University of Brussels. She was a Research Fellow of the Belgian National Science Foundation from 1961 to 1970. Moving to Philadelphia with her husband, Ludo Rocher, she began teaching in 1970 at the University of Pennsylvania, where she became Chair of the Department of South Asia Studies, Director of the National Resource Center for South Asia, and Founding Director of the Program in Asian American Studies.
She is the author of several books and many articles, and has been a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Encyclopedia of Asian History, History of the Language Sciences, International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, and Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, among others. She lives in Philadelphia. Her husband Ludo Rocher, W. Norman Brown Professor Emeritus of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, died in 2016.
Dr. Rosane Rocher and Dr. Ludo Rocher were jointly awarded the 2015 prize of the Fondation Colette Caillat of the Institut de France "for their latest two joint books, The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company and Founders of Western Indology: August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Henry Thomas Colebrooke 1820–1837, and for their lifelong, signal contributions to Sanskrit studies and the history of Indology".

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