Maria Heim is the George Lyman Crosby 1896 & Stanley Warfield Crosby Professor in Religion at Amherst College and a Guggenheim fellow. She received her BA from Reed College and her PhD from Harvard. She works on ancient and classical Indian philosophy and literature, with a specialization in the thought of the fifth-century Theravada scholar, Buddhaghosa. She also works on the history of emotions, and is currently interested in translating Pali texts.