Anannya Bohidar is a historian of late medieval and modern South Asia. She is a doctoral candidate at the Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania, writing her dissertation titled The Female Body and Sexuality in Popular Print Culture in Colonial South India. Her research interests include popular culture, art history, documentation, and archiving.
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John E. Cort is Professor Emeritus of Asian and Comparative Religions at Denison University, where he taught for twenty-eight years. His research focuses on religious rituals, texts and visual culture of western India (Gujarat and Rajasthan), with a special focus on the Jains. He is author of Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India (2001), Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in Jain History (2010), and, with Lawrence A. Babb and Michael W. Meister, Desert Temples: Sacred Centers of Rajasthan in Historical, Art-Historical and Social Contexts(2008), as well as many journal articles and book chapters on the Jains. He is editor of Open Boundaries: Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian History (1998), and co-editor (with Paul Dundas, Knut Jacobsen and Kristi L. Wiley) of Brill’s Encyclopedia of Jainism (2020), and (with Andrea Luithle-Hardenberg and Leslie C. Orr) Cooperation, Contribution and Contestation: The Jain Community, Colonialism and Jainological Scholarship (2020).
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Charlotte Giles is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin and a South Asia reference librarian with The Library of Congress. Her areas of research include labor, gender, and space in the textiles industry in North India. She has attempted to carry those research interests into some of her work at the library. Her linguistic background is Hindi, Urdu, and Persian. She is currently writing her dissertation about gender, space, labor, and pain in the embroidery industry in Lucknow.
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Amy Holmes–Tagchungdarpa is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the author of The Social Life of Tibetan Biography: Textuality, Community and Authority in the Lineage of Tokden Shakya Shri (Lexington, 2014), a study of the trans-Himalayan Buddhist communities inspired by the Tibetan yogi Tokden Shakya Shri (1853-1919). Her current research engages with the use of classical Tibetan as the language of religious affairs, science, and administration throughout areas of South, Inner and East Asia, and considers how its distribution through manuscript and print technologies influenced local and regional conceptions of ritual, tradition, community, ethics, knowledge and identity.
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Rushnae Kabir is a doctoral student in the Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the study of South Asian Islam. Her research explores print culture, gender and identity politics in the nineteenth and twentieth century, with a particular focus on the popular Milād ritual. She is also interested in the dynamics of ‘localization’ and translation of religious canon into vernaculars. Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, she completed her BA in History (Honours) from the University of Delhi and MA in Modern History from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
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Alexandra Kaloyanides is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She researches Burmese religions and American religious history. Her book Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom (Columbia University Press, 2023) examines religious transformations of nineteenth-century Burma with a focus on the American Baptist mission. Her current research project explores natural resources and the way they shape religious expression. Her work has appeared in Material Religion, the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Global Buddhism, MAVCOR Journal, Church History, the Journal of Burma Studies, Religions, Asian Ethnology, Marginalia Review of Books, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
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Yasmeen Khan is Head of the Paper Conservation Section in the Conservation Division of the Library of Congress. Though her conservation work involves treatment of all types of paper and parchment manuscripts and books, her research is focused on the characterization of bookmaking and its associated crafts in the Middle East and South Asia. She continues to develop and study techniques for the preservation of bound manuscripts and printed books from the same geographic area and, as a result, has taught Arab and Persian-style bookbinding and consulted extensively on their preservation. Her publications include technical studies of early Arabic parchment leaves and Armenian bindings, conservation treatments of manuscripts and Islamicate bindings, research into treatment development for iron-gall ink, and the evolution of conservation practice.
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Rebecca Manring is a Professor of India Studies and Religious Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. A researcher of religious groups in northeastern India, Dr. Manring 's Reconstructing Tradition: Advaita Acarya and Gaudiya Vaisnavism at the Cusp of the Twentieth Century has been published by Columbia University Press. She has also completed the preservation and cataloguing of the private literary manuscript collection of the late Sukumar Sen (1900-1992), who was an outstanding linguist and Bengali literary scholar. She is currently working on Middle Bengali literature and preparing a translation of Rupram Chakravarty’s 17th-century Middle Bengali epic, the Dharmamaṅgala, for Oxford University Press. This is a wonderful multi-generational tale of adventure in eastern India that gives us a sense of how ordinary people – not just those at the top of the social hierarchy – lived and thought about their lives. The project has allowed her to work with scholars from around the world at the annual Middle Bengali Reading Retreats, which she helps organize and where she leads several reading sessions on the Dharmamaaṅgala. Eventually she hopes to return to her project on sectarian Sanskrit grammars. Scholars in various religious traditions around South Asia developed such grammars, often modelled on Panini's masterful work but using sectarian tropes to illustrate each grammatical issue raised. Like the hagiographies, these grammars were intended not just to instruct, but to serve definite political purposes. In this project she is studying the grammar Jiva Gosvami developed for Bengali Vaishnava scholars. She teaches courses in Sanskrit, women in South Asian religious traditions, religion in South Asian cinema, and literatures of Indian in translation.
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Christine Marrewa-Karwoski is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University in the City of New York. Previously, she held an ASIANetwork Luce Postdoctoral Fellowship at Bowdoin College. Dr. Marrewa-Karwoski received her Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and holds two Master’s degrees in Religious Studies (Columbia University) and Asian Lanugages and Literatures (University of Washington). At Columbia University, where she completed her dissertation on the Nath yogi community (sampradāy), entitled Imprinted Identity: A History of Literature and Communal Selfhood in the Nath Sampradāy, she critically examines how twentieth century Hindi scholarship, Hindu nationalism, and democracy helped to shape a novel vision of an exclusively Hindu Nath identity. This identity, at times, runs counter to the culturaly inclusive way the community envisioned itself during its formation in the early-modern period. Dr. Marrewa-Karwoski’s interests include: early-modern and modern religious, literary, and cultural history, religious exchange and interaction in early-modern India, book and manuscript culture and circulation, asceticism across Asia, nationalism, and theopolitics. Her research languages are Hindi, Braj, Saddukarri, Avadhi, Sanskrit, and Urdu.
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Sharmeen Mehri is Ph.D. candidate and an international student from Karachi, Pakistan. She holds a Master of Arts degree in English Literature, Language, and Theory from the City University of New York, Hunter College. At Hunter College, Sharmeen was a writing tutor at the Rockowitz Writing Center and an adjunct in the Department of English, teaching courses in Rhetoric and Composition. Sharmeen was an Archival Creators fellow for the South Asian American Digital Archive in 2021-2022 for which she collected oral histories and created an online museum exhibit on migration stories of South Asian Zoroastrians to the United States entitled, Memories We Carry. For 2023-2025, Sharmeen will be a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.
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Murad Khan Mumtaz is an assistant professor of Asian art history at Williams College. He examines historical intersections of art, literature and religious expression in South Asia. His primary research focuses on images of devotion with a special interest in artworks made as part of albums for an early modern Indo-Muslim audience. More recently he has become interested in South Asian devotional networks that weave across Indic and Persianate spheres and include figures such as the medieval poet-saint Kabir and his son Kamal. Murad is also a practicing artist, trained in techniques of traditional Indian miniature painting.
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Shobna Nijhawan is Associate Professor of Hindi at York University, Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere. Periodical Literature in Colonial North India (Oxford University Press 2012), Hindi Publishing in Colonial Lucknow. Gender, Genre and Visuality in the Creation of a Literary Canon (Oxford University Press 2018), editor of Nationalism in the Vernacular (Permanent Black 2010) and co-editor of Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular: Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia (Routledge 2022). She has published various articles on gender, nationalism, Hindi language and literature in late-colonial India as well as on (digital) pedagogy for the South Asian Studies curriculum.
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Pranav Prakash is a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church and an Associate Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Andrew Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, Rare Book School, University of Virginia. He received a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Iowa and a MA in Iranian Studies from the University of Tehran. His academic work focuses on the comparative study of religious traditions, literary cultures and book arts in South Asian and Persian societies.
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Ronit Ricci is the Sternberg-Tamir Chair in Comparative Cultures and Professor in the departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is also affiliated with the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University in Canberra. She teaches the Indonesian language and various courses on Indonesia, Islam in Southeast Asia, travel literature and translation studies. Her research focuses on Islamic manuscript traditions of the Indonesian-Malay world, Javanese literature, exile and diaspora in colonial Asia, and histories and practices of translation. She is the author of Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arab Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon (Cambridge UP, 2019), and editor of Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration (University of Hawaii Press, 2016).
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Megan Eaton Robb is the Julie and Martin Franklin Associate Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is primarily a historian of Islam in South Asia, and her work overall investigates Islam in South Asia, viewed from the perspective of Urdu print publics. She presses on issues that illuminate the religious identity of Muslims in the 20th century and adds attention to material texts to studies of Urdu journalism. Her first book Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life was published with Oxford University Press in 2021. Last year she was the the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in South Asian Islam, in residence at the University of Calgary, where she started research on a new project thinking about the intersection of history of emotions, Islam, and calligraphy in 20th century South Asia.
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Nur Sobers-Khan is currently the director of the Aga Khan Documentation Center, a research centre and archive for the study of Islamic art, visual culture, architecture and urbanism that serves the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at MIT. Previously, she was the Lead Curator for South Asian Collections at the British Library, London, where she was responsible for curating the South Asian printed books and manuscript collections, with a specific focus on the history of Islam in South Asia. While working there she attempted to dismantle the structures of colonial violence embedded in the curation and exhibition of these collections, and failed at this. She was also Principle Investigator of the AHRC-funded research and digitisation project Two Centuries of Indian Print (2016-2021), and her research emerging from this project pivots around two questions: the role of the dispersal and removal of cultural heritage artifacts from South Asia under British colonialism as a contributing factor in shaping the emergence of Islamic reformism in the second half of the 19th century, and the transition from manuscript to print in the same period and the creation of new genres and forms of reading through the circulation of lithographed texts on cosmology, dream interpretation and other divinatory literature.
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She curated the exhibition, Qajar Women: Images of Women in 19th-century Iran, together with Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya, at the Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar, which explored the historical depictions of gender in the context of canonical constructions of Islamic art. Publications include a monograph based on her PhD research, entitled Slaves Without Shackles: Forced Labour and Manumission in the Galata Court Registers, 1560–1572, published by Klaus Schwarz Verlag in 2014 (now by De Gruyter), and Qajar Women: Images of Women in 19th-century Iran (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2016), co-authored with Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya. Her reviews and articles have appeared in Oriens, Journal of Early Modern History, Critical Muslim, and Global Intellectual History. She has lectured at the University of Cambridge and St Mary's University College on the history of the Middle East, South Asia, the early modern Mediterranean and Indian Ocean world. She has also had the opportunity to teach as an associate professor at Habib University in Karachi, Pakistan, where she served as co-director of the new department of Comparative Liberal Studies in her first semester there and also had the opportunity to design and teach the undergraduate courses, “Dream Interpretation: A Decolonial History” and “Islamic Art and Visual Culture: From the Middle East to South Asia.”
A. R. Venkatachalapathy is a historian, author and translator, who has published extensively in Tamil and English languages. He received a PhD in History from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. At present, he is a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. In the past, he has taught at Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, University of Madras, University of Chicago, and National University of Singapore. He has held academic fellowships at Paris, Cambridge and Harvard, and has served as the ICCR Chair in Indian Studies at the National University of Singapore (2011–12). His publications explore the social, cultural and intellectual history of colonial and postcolonial Tamil Nadu. His research interests converge at the intersection of history and literature, focusing specifically on the early history of nationalism, the social history of the Dravidian movement, caste politics, politics of language, and literary cultures.
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An important dimension of his scholarly work has been his attempt to create a critical social science discourses in Tamil communities. Towards this end he has written/edited over 20 books in Tamil combining scholarly discipline with literary flair. His books published in English include The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu; In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History; (ed.), Chennai, Not Madras, and (ed.), In the Tracks of the Mahatma: The Making of a Documentary. He is also a translator and his translations into English include Sundara Ramaswamy’s J.J.: Some Jottings. He has edited Love Stands Alone: Selections from Tamil Sangam Poetry, and Red Lilies and Frightened Birds: ‘Muttollayiram’ for the Penguin Black Classics. He is a recipient of the V.K.R.V. Rao Prize (2007).
Rick Weiss is adjunct professor of South Asian religions at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and research fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies, Heidelberg, Germany. He received his PhD with distinction in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago, specializing in Hinduism, Tamil and Sanskrit. His research publications have focused on the history of Hinduism in South Asia over the past two centuries. His first book, Recipes for Immortality: Medicine, Religion, and Community in South India (Oxford University Press, 2009), analyses the present challenges faced by Tamil traditional siddha doctors. His second book, The Emergence of Modern Hinduism: Religion on the Margins of Colonialism (University of California Press, 2019), argues for the importance of regional, vernacular innovation in processes of Hindu modernization, through a close analysis of the writings of the Tamil Shaiva leader Ramalinga Swami (1823-1874). His current project examines the impact of print on religion, focussing on printed sectarian books published from the 1820s to the 1860s, the period when Tamil Hindu print culture began to take shape
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