During her junior year at Smith College, Diana L. Eck enrolled in a study abroad program that took her to Benares, an Indian holy city which is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.

"I found myself in a position of having to learn from scratch about a culture which I knew almost nothing about," says Eck, who decided to make the trip to India because she felt restive at the time of the Vietnam War and was increasingly aware of how little she knew about Asia. She was so enchanted by her experience there that she decided to embark on an academic career largely focused on the history and religion of India.

Eck, a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies, teaches the popular core course Literature and Arts C-18: "Hindu Myth, Image and Pilgrimage" this semester. She also teaches courses on world religions and pluralism in multicultural America, and currently chairs the Committee on the Study of Religion. Next month, she will step down from this post in order to move into her new role as the co-master of Lowell house with her partner and co-master, Dorothy A. Austin.

Though Eck's academic research and teaching interests have adapted to changes in religious demography and dynamics, she continues to be fascinated by aspects of Hindu culture and religion.

"My own intellectual interests are in the relationship of the Hindu tradition to the landscape of India and to the shaping of some of the dilemmas of Hindu nationalism," Eck says.

The core course, which attracted 278 students this semester, grew out of Eck's own research. It encompasses her earlier work in Benares and her continuing study of the relationship of the myths of Hindu gods with their visual representations and the sacred geography of India.

"I really believe that people are the best at teaching the things that they're working on and are interested in," says Eck, who has also taught a Foreign Cultures course on the sources of Indian civilization. "It's probably a mistake to say that you're going to finish that book while teaching this core class; it never quite works out that way."

Eck says much of the course is devoted to trying to understand a culture in which the gods are presented visually, "since most of us--Christian, Jewish, or secular--grew up in a context in which the gods didn't have 5 heads and 10 arms." Eck adds that Hindu myths are "not abstract stories that you learn at your mother's knee, like Greek mythology, but are actually imprinted on the landscape."

According to Eck, the course appeals both to students who have grown up surrounded by these myths and to those for whom Hindu culture and religion is entirely new material.

"There is a challenge for trying to talk to and enable a learning experience for both groups of people," she says.

An integral part of the course, and of Eck's research, is to understand how the Hindu religion survives and changes in today's world.

The interest in the place or religions in modern societies led Eck to formulate the Pluralism Project, which, unlike her earlier, is focused on religious life in America. The project is an ongoing research endeavor designed to coordinate and examine various religious communities and centers throughout the United States.

Eck says her interest shifted from the international scene to pluralism in America when the demographic composition of students at Harvard began to change in the late 1980s.

"What I discovered after looking at pluralism on the international scene was that suddenly these questions were extremely important on the American scene," Eck says. She points to the 1965 immigration act as a turning point for the growth of religious diversity in America.

When the student population of Harvard began to include second-generation children of immigrants, Eck took notice of the shift.

"It changed the teaching situation here and changed what I feel I need to know in order to teach religion," she says.

Eck has been a director of the Pluralism Project since 1991. The project has involved undergraduates and graduate students to do research on religious communities in their own hometowns. For four years, they have compiled data such as the number of Buddhist temples, mosques and other places of worship in cities like Minneapolis, Denver, Salt Lake City and Pittsburgh.

The first publication of the Pluralism Project is a CD-ROM titled "On Common Ground," which Eck says is an appropriate means of making the material accessible and useful to eighth graders and graduate students alike.

"But it's an awful thing to produce," she says. "It's like writing a 3,000 page book in little bits that people can look at in any order they want."

Recently, Eck has enlisted religion departments at other universities to assist in the project.

"It's not only interesting research about America, but also an important form of teaching...a new set of relationships that departments ought to have with religious groups in their own neighborhoods for pedagogical purposes," Eck says.

According to Eck, the Pluralism Project is a good example of the interdisciplinary nature of the study of religion.

"When you study religion, you have to study history, art, languages...whole civilizations," she says.