Patrick Olivelle is Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a past President of the American Oriental Society and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Olivelle was awarded the honorary doctorate of Humane Letters by the University of Chicago in 2016, the 2017 Prize of Fondation Colette Caillat of the Institut de France, the Career Research Excellence Award by the University of Texas in Austin in 2011 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. He is the author of over thirty books, some of which have won awards from the American Academy of Religion and the Association of Asian Studies. He received his MA from Oxford University and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.