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Noha Abou-Khatwa is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at at American University in Cairo. Her main research interests are the manuscript culture and architecture of the Medieval Muslim world, with a focus on the Mamluks. She earned her PhD from University of Toronto in Islamic Art and Material Culture, writing a dissertation on “Calligraphers, Illuminators and Patrons: Mamluk Qur’an Manuscripts from 1341-1412 AD in light of the collection of the National Library of Egypt.” Prior to joining the University of Toronto, she worked at the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, where she started and directed until 2006 The Dar al-Kutub Manuscript Conservation Project. She also founded the Islamic Art Network, which was created to aid researchers and scholars in the field. She publishes on epigraphy, calligraphy and Qur’an manuscripts.

Andrea Acri obtained his doctorate at the University of Leiden in 2011, and held various research and teaching positions in India (Nalanda University), Singapore (Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre and National Unversity of Singapore), and Australia (ANU). He has authored articles in international academic journals and published edited volumes on Shaiva and Buddhist tantric traditions in South and Southeast Asia, as well as wider cultural and historical dynamics of Intra-Asian connectivity. His monograph Dharma Pātañjala: A Śaiva Scripture from Ancient Java Studied in the Light of Related Old Javanese and Sanskrit Texts, originally appeared in the Gonda Indological Studies Series (Egbert Forsten/Brill, 2011), has been recently republished in India by Aditya Prakashan (New Delhi, 2017) and translated into Indonesian (EFEO/KPG, Jakarta, 2018).

Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and curator based in Bombay. She has written consistently on the practices of many generations of Indian women artists. She was Joint Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012) and has curated a number of exhibitions including, most recently Sudhir Patwardhan’s retrospective ‘Walking Through Soul City’ at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay, in 2019/2020 and ‘Counter-Canon, Counter-Culture: Alternative Histories of Indian Art’ at the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2019.

Adajania has proposed several new theoretical models through her extensive writings on media art, public art, the biennial culture from the Global South, transcultural art practices, subaltern art and the relationship of art to the public sphere. Adajania recently edited two transdisciplinary anthologies Some Things That Only Art Can Do: A Lexicon of Affective Knowledge and Totems and Taboos: what can and cannot be done (Raza Foundation, 2017, 2018).

Sucharita Adluri holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of research include Sanskrit commentarial traditions, Indian Philosophy, and the social and religious history of devotional traditions of South India. In addition to her recent monograph, "Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought", she is widely published in international journals such as the Journal of Hindu Studies, the Journal of Indian Philosophy, and South Asian Studies. As Associate Professor of Comparative Religion, she currently teaches Asian religions at Cleveland State University.

Roda Ahluwalia has a Masters degree from SOAS, London, and is a Member of the Board of Governors at the K R Cama Oriental Institute, Mumbai where she recently presented a paper and organised a seminar on the Art and Culture of Mughal India. The seminar attracted renowned international scholars and Roda is presently editing the proceeds for publication. She is the author of Rajput Painting, Romantic, Divine and Courtly Art from India as well as articles related to Rajput painting and Ramayana manuscripts. She has worked on projects at the British Museum, the CSMVS at Mumbai, the National Museum of Singapore and the British Library. She has delivered lectures at SOAS, the British Museum, the CSMVS and has taught at SOAS as well as at the Birkbeck University Adult Education Course, 2003-04. She is currently researching a sub-imperial Mughal illustrated Ramayana manuscript.

Sabih Ahmed is a curator and writer living in Dubai. His practice focuses on modern and contemporary art of South Asia through diverse itineraries and inter-disciplinary formations. He has been serving as the Associate Director and Curator at the Ishara Art Foundation since 2020, a non-profit organisation in Dubai dedicated to contemporary art from the subcontinent and its diaspora. From 2009-2019, Ahmed was with the Asia Art Archive as a Senior Researcher and Projects Manager where he was involved in establishing Asia Art Archive in India (AAA in I) in New Delhi. He has led numerous research projects that include the digitisation of artist archives, compilation of multi-lingual bibliographies and he has organised workshops, conferences and seminars on archiving and educational resources. He was a Visiting Faculty at the Ambedkar University Delhi from 2014-2019 and sits on the Advisory Board of Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation, Delhi.

Ahmed’s curation and artist collaborations include being on the Curatorial Collegiate of the 11th Shanghai Biennale ‘Why Not Ask Again?’ curated by Raqs Media Collective in Shanghai (2016), ‘The Superhero Summit’ in collaboration with Taus Makhacheva at Kadist and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019), and most recently ‘Notations on Time’ co-curated with Sandhini Poddar at Ishara, Dubai (2023).

He writes and lectures regularly, and his essays and interviews have appeared in publications by The Whitworth, Arts of the Working Class, Arts Cabinet, Mousse, Oncurating, The Sarai Reader, among others. With Lantian Xie, he is the co-author of the upcoming book 'Mass Traffic' (Mousse Publishing and Kunsthalle Bern, 2023).

Naman P. Ahuja is Professor of Indian Art and Architecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His book, The Making of the Modern Indian Artist-Craftsman: Devi Prasad (Routledge, 2011). Some of his other publications include: Divine Presence, The Arts of India and the Himalayas (Five continents editions, Milan, 2003, translated into Catalan and Spanish) and The Body in Indian Art and Thought (Ludion, Antwerp, 2013, also available in French and Dutch). He has held Fellowships, Visiting Professorships and curatorial charges at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, The British Museum, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of Zurich, the Kusnthistorisches Institut in Florence, amongst others. He has curated various acclaimed exhibitions, the most recent of which, The Body in Indian Art was shown at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels for Europalia.13 and, in 2014, at the National Museum, New Delhi. It explored the formation of the Arts and Crafts Movement and how it, in turn impacted the aesthetic and political influences of Coomaraswamy, Gandhi and Tagore as shown in the pedagogy of the institutions of Santiniketan and Sevagram.

His research and graduate teaching focus on periods of artistic / visual exchange in pre-modern societies like ancient Gandhara on the borderlands of Afghanistan and Punjab and in the manuscripts painted in the Sultanate period in India. His studies on early Indian terracottas, ivories and small finds have drawn attention to unique sources for Indian history that reveal much about the private world of Ancient Indians. These objects tell us about the trade and ritual cultures from a domestic sphere rather than what is normally understood only through public monuments.

Molly Emma Aitken is an Associate Professor in the Art History Department at The Graduate Center, CUNY and the Art Department at CUNY’s City College of New York. Her publications include When Gold Blossoms: Indian Jewelry from the Susan L. Beningson Collection (London: Asia Society and Philip Wilson Publishers, 2004), and The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), which won CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey award in 2011 and the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2012. She has drafted most of a co-authored monograph on the classical Indian heroine or nayika in Mughal, Deccan and Rajput painting and poetry with a professor of early modern Hindi literature at Columbia University, Allison Busch (1969-2019). Aitken is currently working on two manuscripts. One, tentatively titled, We Are All Women is about gender, eros and play in Mughal painting; the second, with the working title In the Sisterhood of Images, is a memoir in art history. Aitken has been travelling to India for research since 1992 when she apprenticed for a year to renowned Mughal and Rajput painting master Bannu ji. She misses being a painter; the experience of making still colours all of her scholarships.

Tanveer Ajsi is an independent art historian and cultural theorist. He has written extensively on theatre, performing arts, visual arts and literature, besides translating and directing plays, and curating and conceptualizing exhibitions.

Manasicha Akepiyapornchai received her bachelor’s degree in Pali and Sanskrit from the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, in 2014. She received her master’s degree in South Asian Studies from Cornell University, USA, in 2016. Her thesis is titled “Vedāntadeśika’s Interpretation of Rāmānuja’s Prapatti: A Study based on the Nikṣeparakṣā.” She is pursuing a doctoral degree in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture from the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University. Her project, under the supervision of Lawrence J. McCrea, focuses on the soteriological development of the Śrīvaiṣṇavas’ doctrine of self-surrender (prapatti). She is expecting to graduate in May 2022.

Suad Amiry has lived most of her life between Amman, Damascus, Beirut and Cairo and now lives in Ramallah, Palestine. Amiry is the founder of the Palestinian NGO RIWAQ, a winner of the 2013 Aga Khan award for Architecture. Riwaq documents conserves and rehabilitates historic buildings and centers in rural Palestine. She’s also the author of Sharon and My Mother in Law, which won the prestigious Premeo Viareggio award.

Suganya Anandakichenin did her Ph.D. at the Universität Hamburg on Kulacēkara Āḻvār’s Perumāḷ Tirumoḻi. She published a philological translation of this work along with that of the whole medieval commentary in Manipravalam by Periyavāccāṉ Piḷḷai in 2018. She currently works as a postdoctoral fellow at the SFB 950, Centre for the Studies of Manuscript Cultures, Universität Hamburg. Her research interests include Tamil bhakti poetry, medieval Śrīvaiṣṇava writings in Manipravalam, commentary traditions in India, Tamil-Sanskrit interactions, and the transmission of texts via manuscripts in South India.

Arjun Appadurai is Emeritus Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and Max Weber Global Professor at The Bard Graduate Center in New York. He is also a Visiting Professor at The Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University (Berlin) and Honorary Professor at Erasmus University (Rotterdam). During his academic career, he has also held professorial chairs at Yale University, The New School, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, and visiting positions at numerous institutions around the world.

Professor Appadurai was born and educated in Bombay. He graduated from St. Xavier’s High School and took his Intermediate Arts degree from Elphinstone College before coming to the United States. He earned his B.A. from Brandeis University in 1970, and his M.A. (1973) and Ph.D. (1976) from The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles, including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Duke 2006), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minnesota 1996; Oxford India 1997) and The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (Verso 2013), and Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age f Derivative Finance (Chicago, 2016). His most recent book, co-authored with Neta Alexander, is Failure (Polity Press 2019)). His books have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Italian, Turkish and Arabic.

Karen Archey is Curator of Contemporary Art at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. At the Stedelijk, Archey cares for the contemporary art and time-based media collections, and organizes the museum’s performance program and contemporary permanent collection display. She has curated major solo exhibitions of artists Hito Steyerl, Rineke Dijkstra, and Metahaven, and is currently preparing a large-scale overview of the work of Marina Abramović.

Formerly based in Berlin and New York, Archey worked earlier as an independent curator, editor, and art critic, and was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for short-form writing in 2015. Her recently published book After Institutions examines museums as a troubled, rapidly evolving public space and renews discussions around Institutional Critique. A frequent public speaker, she has recently given lectures at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Swiss Institute, Moderna Museet, and MUDAM, among other institutions.

Portrait credit: Tomek Dersu Aaron

When she was eight, Samhita Arni started writing and illustrating her first book. The Mahabharata - A Child's View, (Tara Books, 1996) went on to be published in seven language editions and sell 50,000 copies worldwide, winning the Elsa Morante Literary Award, and receiving commendations from the German Academy for Youth Literature and Media and The Spanish Ministry of Culture. Samhita's second book, Sita's Ramayana, a graphic novel developed in collaboration with Patua Artist Moyna Chitrakar, was published by Tara Books in 2011. Her third book and first novel, a speculative fiction feminist thriller, also based on the Ramayana, is forthcoming from Zubaan in 2012.

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of ten books of political writing or ‘history of the present’ including 'The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, & Prague', 'The File: A Personal History', 'In Europe’s Name and Facts are Subversive'. He writes a column on international affairs in the 'Guardian', which is widely syndicated, and is a regular contributor to the 'New York Review of Books', amongst other journals. He leads the 13-language Oxford University research project Freespeechdebate.com, and his latest book is 'Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World'. Awards he has received for his writing include the George Orwell Prize.

Sussan Babaie is Reader in Islamic and Persian arts at The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Before joining The Courtauld in 2013, she taught at Smith College, the University of Michigan, and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. She has curated the exhibition Strolling in Isfahan at the Sackler Museum of Harvard University, and installations of Islamic arts at Smith College and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
She is the author of Isfahan and Its Palaces: Statecraft, Shi‘ism and the Architecture of Conviviality in Early Modern Iran (2008 and paperback 2018), and co-author and editor of several books including Iran After the Mongols(2019), The Mercantile Effect: On Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World During the 17th and 18th Centuries (2017),Honar: The Afkhami Collection of Modern and Contemporary Iranian Art (2017), Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis (2014), Shirin Neshat (2013), and Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran (2004, paperback 2018). Currently, she is working on a book about the intersections between visual and gustatory taste in early modern Iran.
Babaie studied Graphic Design (BA, Tehran University), History of Renaissance Arts (MA, American University, Washington, DC), and History of Islamic Arts (PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University). Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (United States), the Fulbright (for Egypt and Syria) and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Dr. Jan Babnik is an editor, curator, lecturer and writer. He is editor in chief of Membrana and Fotografija (www.membrana.org), a Slovenian based journal on photography, and director of Membrana Institute, which publishes the journal, runs educational modules on photography theory and criticism and organises exhibitions. He is engaged primarily with photographic theory, specifically documentary photography, discourse on photography and the philosophy of visual culture. He has edited numerous translations of theoretical works on photography into the Slovenian language and, as a writer, collaborated with several publishing houses and participated in various international conferences on photography. Babnik has been a guest lecturer at Slovenian universities, including the Faculty of Social Sciences - Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology and the University of Ljubljana. He holds an MPhil in History of Philosophy and Phenomenology from the University of Ljubljana and a PhD in Philosophy of Visual Culture from the University of Primorska.

Jairus Banaji is Research Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, and is actively associated with the journals Historical Materialism and Journal of Agrarian Change. He grew up in Bombay in the 1950s till his parents left for the UK. In 1965 he won a scholarship to Oxford to study Classics, Ancient History and Modern Philosophy, after which he did a diploma and then a B.Litt. in Social Anthropology, also at Oxford. In 1972 he decided to come back to India and joined the Centre for Historical Studies in JNU where he worked with Professors Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Bipan Chandra. In the mid-1970s he moved to Bombay and became increasingly active with workers there, along with Praful Bidwai, Javed Anand and others. He returned to Oxford in 1986 to start doctoral work in Late Roman economic history. This thesis was published as Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour and Aristocratic Dominance (2001). He was active in Insaaniyat following the Gujarat violence of 2002, working with Anjum Rajabali and others. His latest books include Fascism: Essays on Europe and India (2013) and Exploring the Economy of Late Antiquity: Selected Essays (2016). Banaji works in several languages and has published widely. His most recent work is scheduled for publication later this year: A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (with Haymarket, this summer), and a translation of Henryk Grossman’s massive book on Marx’s theory of crises (with Brill, in the autumn).

Mr. Amol N. Bankar is an Indological researcher working in the domains of Epigraphy and Numismatics with his prime focus on pre-modern Maharashtra. Bankar has contributed more than 25 articles on coins and epigraphy in leading National and International Journals. He is a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He has been studying the hagiographies of Nathasiddhas and is writing a monograph on 'Nathasiddha tradition of early medieval Maharashtra'.

Arghya Basu (1971 - 2019) worked in Asian Aesthetics, Buddhism and Comparative Religion, and socio-linguistics; he wrote and practised integrating text and life. He taught Film at various academic institutions, and worked with the intangible visceral in Cinema.

Chandreyi Basu is Associate Professor at St. Lawrence University, USA, where she has taught Asian art since earning herPh.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2001. Her scholarship focuses on the art of early historic northwest India and Pakistan, specifically patronage and iconography of Mathura sculpture.Her recent publications highlight the urban underpinnings of Gandharan narrative art and the interactions between non-human and human animals in ancient Bharhut. She recently curated an exhibit for the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence featuring nearly fifty paintings by thirty five individual Indian artists working outside mainstream contemporary art.

Prof. Sir Christopher Bayly (1945 - 2015) — K.B., DPhil., Litt. D (Cantab.), FBA, FRHist Soc., FRSL. was Professor, Lecturer, Reader of History and Fellow at the University of Cambridge since 1970. He held visiting positions at several universities in Europe and the U.S. and was most recently elected Vivekananda Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and Visiting Professor at the Queen Mary University of London. He has published a number of books on the intellectual and social history of South Asia, most recent amongst which is titled ‘Recovering Liberties. Indian thought in the age of liberalism and empire’ (2011). His current research work is provisionally titled: ‘The Transformation of the Modern World: crisis and achievement, 1900-2014’. In 2007, he was appointed Knight Bachelor ‘for services to history outside Europe.’

Dr. Susan Bean is the Chair, Center for Art and Archaeology, American Institute of Indian
Studies, Gurugram, India, since 2014. She was the Curator, South Asian and Korean Art at the Peabody Essex Museum where she curated several path-breaking exhibitions and is a recipient of numerous grants and fellowships. Lectured widely, her numerous publications are a testimony to her wide ranging scholarship.

Doris Behrens-Abouseif, is Professor (emerita), SOAS, University of London. From 2000-2014 she held the Nasser D Khalili Chair of Islamic Art and Archaeology at SOAS. Her list of publications covers a wide range of subjects from the early period to the 19th century with focus on Egypt and Syria: history of Islamic architecture and urbanism, cultural history, concepts of aesthetics, material culture and the decorative arts

Boris Čučković Berger works on critical studies of art and media. He is Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art, where he delivers courses related to media practices of contemporary art; Cold War period criticism and theory; and the methodological frameworks of art history. His research focuses on the cultural status of digital production and its transformations in historical contexts such as the 2008 financial crisis or the emerging socio-technical conditions of platform economies.

Boris published widely on topics in art history and new media studies such as: the open source cultural practices; digitally produced sculptures; and art engaged with workspace infrastructure. He holds degrees in both art history and information science from the universities of Zagreb, Leiden, Amsterdam and London.

Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English, the Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center and the Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost at Harvard University. Bhabha is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, and cosmopolitanism, among other themes. Some of his works include Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture, which was reprinted as a Routeledge Classic in 2004. Harvard University Press will publish his forthcoming book A Global Measure, and Columbia University Press will publish his next book The Right to Narrate.

Aniket Bhagwat is a third-generation landscape architect at M/S Prabhakar B. Bhagwat which is a landscape design firm with a lineage of over eight decades. It is arguably, the most influential landscape design firm in the country, setting standards in its field. As a firm they have also defined and established several design typologies. Being involved in some important planning projects, since over a decade, they have accepted select architectural commissions, which have also been critically acclaimed by national and international press. Bhagwat has been instrumental in areas of architectural writing and research as well, with publications like SPADE and LEAF, and the 12X12 speakers’ platform. He has been a speaker at many forums, and works towards exploring new idioms and typologies, as well as collaborative design processes.

Shailendra Bhandare is Assistant Keeper, South Asian and Far-eastern Numismatics and Paper Money Collections, a Fellow of St Cross College and a member of Faculty of Oriental Studies. He started his career as a Numismatist with a visiting fellowship at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. He was then appointed as a post-doctoral fellow of the Society for South Asian Studies, and worked as a curator in the British Museum on the coins of Later Mughals and the Indian Princely States. He was appointed as curator of coins in the Ashmolean Museum in 2002.

He was born and brought up in Mumbai, India where he received his first degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences. He holds a Masters degree in History and a Doctorate in Ancient Indian Culture awarded by the University of Mumbai. His latest publications are:
‘Ruling the Waves: the Maritime World and Networks of the Kadambas of Goa’ – in CSMVS Research Journal, Centenary issue, ed. Saryu Doshi, CSMVS, Mumbai, 2023

‘Gold coins of the Hindu Shahi ruler Bhimadeva’ – Journal of the Oriental Numismatic Society, 255, Spring 2024

Kaushik Bhaumik is Vice President, Osian's - Connoisseurs of Art. He has published articles on Indian and World Cinema in various anthologies. He is co-editor of Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader due later this year from Berg Publishers, Oxford.

Akeel Bilgrami got a B.A in English Literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he is also a Professor on the Committee on Global Thought. He was the Director of the Humanities Center at Columbia University for seven years and is currently the Director of its South Asian Institute. His publications include the books Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), Democratic Culture (2012), and Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (2014). He is due to publish two short books in the near future: What is a Muslim? and Gandhi's Integrity. His long-term future work is on the relations between agency, value, rationality, and politics.

Evrim Binbaş received his PhD degree from the University of Chicago, and after seven years at Royal Holloway, University of London, he moved to the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn. He studies early modern Islamic history with a particular focus on the Timurid dynasty in the fifteenth century. His first book on the Timurid historian Sharaf al-Din ‘Ali Yazdi (d. 1454) was published by the Cambridge University Press (Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn 'AlīYazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters). The Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran won the 2017 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize in Middle Eastern Studies, and it was shortlisted for the 2017 Gladstone Prize by the Royal Historical Society in Britain, and for the 2017-2018 Book of the Year Award in Iranian Studies by the National Library and Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Currently he is working on three different book projects. Together with John E. Woods of the University of Chicago he is preparing a critical edition of Yazdi’sZayl-iZafarnama, which is the second and so-far unpublished volume of the Zafarnama. He is also editing, also together with John E. Woods, a handbook on Timurid dynasty titled The Timurid Dynasty: A Handbook. The book was commissioned by Brill in Leiden, and when it is published, it will include contributions from more than thirty scholars working on the early modern Islamic history. Finally, he is preparing a monograph on early modern Islamicate political ideas.

Jason Birch (DPhil, Oxon) is a senior research fellow for the ‘Light on Hatha Yoga’ project, hosted at SOAS University of London and the University of Marburg. He is also a visiting researcher on the Suśruta Project at the University of Alberta (http://sushrutaproject.org). He is well known for his important paper on the meaning of haṭha in early Haṭhayoga, which has reshaped our understanding of the origins of this term by locating it within Buddhist literature. His dissertation focused on a seminal Rājayoga text called the Amanaska. Through extensive fieldwork in India and the reconstruction of primary sources, Birch has identified the earliest text to teach a system of Haṭhayoga and Rājayoga, namely the twelfth-century Amaraugha. His most recent publication has defined a corpus of Sanskrit and vernacular texts that emerged during Haṭhayoga's floruit, the period in which it thrived on the eve of colonialism.

Kamalika Bose is a Mumbai-based urban conservationist, architectural historian, and founder of Heritage Synergies India - an independent practice. Her scholarship focuses on architectural and urban heritage in India - having consulted and published extensively on prestigious national and international projects, along with actively advocating for the preservation of heritage precincts and communities. She was a Fulbright Scholar, a Society of Architectural Historians - Getty International Fellow and Assistant Professor at CEPT University, Ahmedabad. She has authored five books, including The Hoysala Legacy (Jaico, 2019) and People Called Kolkata (PenguinRH, 2019). Kamalika obtained a Master’s in Historic Preservation Planning from Cornell University and has worked at Historic Districts Council, New York, and Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York. She is also the Coordinator, National Scientific Committee - Shared Built Heritage, ICOMOS India, and advisor to Kolkata Architecture Foundation.

Pia Brancaccio is Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA. Her research focuses on early Buddhist art and cross-cultural exchange in South Asia with a regional emphasis on the visual cultures of the Deccan Plateau and ancient Gandhara. She has published extensively on the Buddhist caves in Western Deccan, including a monograph on The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad (2010) and the edited volume Living Rock (2013), and has recently expanded her interests to ancient Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean exchange networks. Pia has also written on architecture, visual narratives, artistic workshops and the multicultural fabric of Buddhism in Gandhara, and co-edited the book Gandharan Buddhism: Art, Archaeology (2006). She is currently involved in a research project on Ancient Buddhism in Konkan.

Crispin Branfoot is Reader in the History of South Asian Art & Archaeology at SOAS, University of London. His research interests focus on the art and architectural history of the south Indian temple, especially in the Tamil region. His books include Gods on the Move: architecture and ritual in the south Indian temple (2007), with Roger Taylor Captain Linnaeus Tripe: photographer of India and Burma 1852-1860 (2014), with Archana Venkatesan, In Andal's Garden: Art, Ornament and Devotion in Srivilliputtur (2015) and editor of Portraiture in South Asia since the Mughals: Art, Representation and History (2018).

Raymond Brassier is a member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction and the translator of Alain Badiou's 'Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and Theoretical Writings' and Quentin Meillassoux's 'After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.'

David Bromwich is the Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. His publications include 'Hazlitt: the Mind of a Critic' (Oxford University Press, 1983), 'A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost' (Harvard University Press, 1989), 'Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking' (Yale University Press, 1992), 'Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s' (University of Chicago Press, 1998) and 'Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry' (University of Chicago Press, 2001). Skeptical Music won him the 2002 PEN Spielvogel/Diamonstein prize for best book of essays. Among the honours he has received are the Blumenthal Prize (1976) and a Guggenheim Fellowship for work on romantic and modern poetry (1986-87).

Dr Mirjam Brusius is a research fellow in Colonial and Global History at the German Historical Institute London, and currently sponsored through its India Visiting fellowship programme. She holds degrees in History of Art and Cultural Studies (MA Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 2007) and History and Philosophy of Science (PhD University of Cambridge 2011). Her current interests concern the history of archaeology, the history of heritage, the history of photography, and the tensions between preservation and destruction in the Middle East and Europe. She recently co-edited (with Kavita Singh) 'Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt' (Routledge, 2018).

Guy Burak is the Librarian for Middle Eastern, Islamic and Jewish Studies and NYU's Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. He has written extensively on Islamic law, the history of the post-Mongol period and Islamic visual and material cultures. In recent years, he has been studying Islamic devotional objects and texts.

Bonnie Burnham is President of World Monuments Fund and has led its international historic preservation work since 1985, when she joined the organization as Executive Director. She holds degrees in the history of art from the University of Florida and the Université de Paris-Sorbonne.She has been honored as a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters, is a Distinguished Alumna of the College of Fine Arts of the University of Florida, and is the first recipient of its Beinecke-Reeves Distinguished Achievement Award in Historic Preservation. She received the Founders Award for Civic Leadership from Partners for Livable Communities in 2013. She holds an honorary doctorate from Florida Southern College.

Himanshu Burte is an architect, critic and urbanist teaching at the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. His book, Space for Engagement: The Indian Artplace and a Habitational Approach to Architecture (Seagull Books, 2008. Kolkata), proposes an alternative conceptual framework for architecture centred on the act of dwelling. A former Fulbright Fellow with a Ph. D. in Urban Planning (CEPT University, Ahmedabad), Burte has published extensively in the professional, popular and academic press for over twenty five years. His research interests include modernism, public space, urban infrastructure, housing policy, theatre architecture and sustainable urbanism. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Panel of Marg Publications.

Zoe Butt is a curator and writer, nurturing critically thinking and historically conscious artistic communities, fostering dialogue among cultures of the globalizing souths. Possessing an extensive exhibition, publishing and public-speaking history globally, in 2022, she founded ‘in-tangible institute’, seeking a robust ecology for locally-responsive curatorial talent in Southeast Asia. Zoe holds a PhD by Published Works, Center for Research and Education in Art and Media, University of Westminster, London and is currently Lead Advisor (Southeast Asia and Oceania), Kadist Art Foundation. Previously she was Artistic Director, Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City (2017-2021), Executive Director, Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City (2009–2016); Director, International Programs, Long March Project, Beijing (2007–2009); Assistant Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2001–2007). Notable endeavours include Pollination (2018-); Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber - Journey Beyond the Arrow, (2019); Conscious Realities (2013-2016) and San Art Laboratory (2012-2015). She has been published by Hatje Cantz; JRP-Ringier; Routledge; Sternberg Press, among others and is a MoMA International Curatorial Fellow, NYC; member of Asia Society’s ‘Asia 21’ initiative, NYC; and member of Asian Art Council, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC. Zoe lives between Chiang Mai, Ho Chi Minh City and Sydney. www.in-tangible.org

Thomas P. Campbell became the ninth Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art on January 1, 2009. Before becoming Director, Dr. Campbell had worked in the Metropolitan's Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts for fourteen years, rising steadily through the curatorial ranks as Assistant Curator (1995-97), Associate Curator (1997-2003), and Curator (2003 to December 2008). During this time, he conceived and organized the major exhibitions Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (2002) and Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor (2007).

In October 2009 Dr. Sheila Canby was appointed Patti Cadby Birch Curator in Charge of the Islamic Art Metropolitan Museum of Art, having served as Curator of Islamic Art and Antiquities at the British Museum from 1991 to 2009. Her department’s new galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia opened in 2011. Her publications include Shah `Abbas and the Imperial Treasures of Iran (2009) Islamic Art in Detail (2005), Hunt for Paradise: Court Arts of Safavid Iran, 1501-76, co-editor with Jon Thompson (2003), The Golden Age of Persian Art, 1501-1722 (1999), Persian Painting (1993) and The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp (2011 and 2014). In spring-summer 2016 she co-curated the special exhibition, “Court and Cosmos: the Great Age of the Seljuqs”, and co-authored the catalogue with curators Deniz Beyazit and Martina Rugiadi.

Aaron Cezar is the founding Director of Delfina Foundation, where he curates and develops its interrelated programme of residencies, exhibitions and public platforms.

Cezar has curated external exhibitions, performances and programmes at Hayward Gallery Project Space, SongEun Artspace, and in the framework of the 58th Venice Art Biennale. He has written for The Art Newspaper, Harper’s Bazaar, and ArtAsiaPacific, among others.

Cezar is Advisor-at-large at Art Jameel, one of Delfina Foundation’s strategic partners, and he has been appointed to numerous boards, committees and advisory groups.

Cezar graduated from Princeton University with a first degree in Economics and a certificate in Dance and Theatre. He earned a postgraduate degree in the Creative & Cultural Industries from King’s College London. In June 2017, he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal College of Arts, London.

Dr. Nachiket Chanchani is Assistant Professor of South Asian Art and Visual Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. For the 2012-13 academic year, he has received research leave from the University in order to hold a Smithsonian Institution History of Art Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC.

Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and Founding Director of the Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, USA. He earned his BA at Stony Brook University and the MA and PhD at Fordham University in New York City. He joined the faculty of LMU in 1985. He has published more than 20 books, including the following single author studies (all with State University of New York Press): Karma and Creativity (1986), Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions (1993), Reconciling Yogas: Haribhadra’s Array of Views on Yoga with a New Translation of the Yogadṛṣṭisamuccaya (2003), Yoga and the Luminous: Patañjali’s Spiritual Path to Freedom (2008), Living Landscapes: Meditation on the Elements in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas (2020).
He has published many edited volumes on the topic of Religion and Ecology, including Jainism and Ecology (Harvard University Press and Motilal Banarsidass). Recent publications included an edited volume on Yoga in Jainism (Routledge, 2016) and Thinking with the Yoga Sutra: Translation and Interpretation (with Ana Funes Maderey, Routledge, 2019).
Chris serves on many advisory boards, including the South Asian Studies Association, the Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale), the Ahimsa Center (Pomona), the Jain Studies Centre (SOAS, London), the Dharma Academy of North America (Berkeley), and the International School for Jain Studies (Delhi).

Mortimer Chatterjee received his Masters in the History of Indian Art and Architecture from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. In 2003 he and his wife, Tara, began Chatterjee & Lal. Today based in Colaba’s art district of Mumbai, the gallery’s program is focused both on the work of emerging artists and historical material. His recent projects have included a co-authored publication on the art collection of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research along with an exhibition of that collection at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai.

Shilpa Chheda has been teaching Jainism for over 20 years. She is the Coordinator of the Jainology Diploma and Certificate Course held at the Department of Philosophy, University of Mumbai. She is also the Curator at the Heras Institute of Indian History and Culture, St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. She has a background in Jaina Art and Aesthetics, Comparative Mythology and World Religions.

Swati Chemburkar is an architectural historian whose work focuses on Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia. Her primary interest lies in the religious culture and architecture of Jayavaraman VII. Presently, she directs a post-graduate diploma on Southeast Asian Art and Architecture at Jnanapravaha, Mumbai and teaches on the Summer Programmes organised by SAAAP, School of Oriental and African Studies in Southeast Asia. She is the editor of Art of Cambodia: Interactions with India, MARG, 2015-2016. Some of her recent publications include Khmer Empire and Southeast Asia, 800-1450 in Global History of Architecture, Ed. Murray Fraser, 2018 and stūpa to Maṇḍala: Tracing a Buddhist Architectural Development from Kesariya to Borobudur to Tabo, Pacific World, Third Series, no. 20, 2018.

Padmini Chettur began her contemporary dance career in 1990 with Chandralekha, the radical modernist, Bharatanatyam choreographer whose oeuvre deconstructed the form of Bharatanatyam. Breaking away from Chandralekha’s work in 2001, Padmini’s practice shifted the choreographic tradition to a minimal language that has visually translated concepts of time and space as they relate to contemporary experience. Deriving vocabularies from phenomenology, cultural studies, insect movements, astronomy, physiotherapy, and sport, she has created a taut visual language that exits the narrow bounds of the stage. During her career as a choreographer, spanning two decades, she collaborated with sculptors, light artists, filmmakers, and sound-artists. Her approach to movement research is scientific in rigueur. From Wings and Masks (1993) throughout her oeuvre, Padmini has been concerned with refining form through experiments with the body.

Lorenzo Chiesa is Director of the GSH – Genoa School of Humanities and Visiting Professor at the European University at St Petersburg and at the Freud’s Dream Museum of the same city. He was previously Professor of Modern European Thought at the University of Kent, where he founded and directed the Centre for Critical Thought. He also held visiting positions at a number of other institutions, including the University of New Mexico, the Istituto di Scienze Umane (SUM) of Naples, and the Institute of Philosophy of Ljubljana. He published books and edited collections on Lacan (Subjectivity and Otherness, MIT Press, 2007; Lacan and Philosophy, Re.press, 2014) and on biopolitical thought (The Italian Difference, Re.press, 2009 – with Alberto Toscano; Italian Thought Today, Routledge, 2014). Recently, he published two new books: The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan (MIT Press, 2016) and The Virtual Point of Freedom. Essays on Politics, Aesthetics, and Religion (Northwestern UP, 2016). He edited and translated books by Agamben and Virno into English and by Žižek into Italian. His work has been translated into more than ten languages.

Indira Chowdhury heads the Centre for Public History at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore. Formerly Professor of English at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, she has a PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her book, The Frail Hero and Virile History (OUP, 1998), was awarded the Tagore Prize in 2001. In 2004, she published The First Promise, a translation of a major Bengali novel by Ashapurna Devi, into English. Her book, Growing the Tree of Science: Homi Bhabha and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

Francis X. Clooney, S.J., is the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology. His primary areas of Indological scholarship are theological commentarial writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India. Clooney is the author of numerous articles and books, including Thinking Ritually: Retrieving the Purva Mimamsa of Jaimini (Vienna, 1990), Theology after Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology (State University of New York Press, 1993), Beyond Compare: St. Francis de Sales and Sri Vedanta Desika on Loving Surrender to God (Georgetown University Press, 2008), The Truth, the Way, the Life: Christian Commentary on the Three Holy Mantras of the Shrivaisnava Hindus (Peeters Publishing, 2008), Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), and His Hiding Place Is Darkness: A Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics of Divine Absence (Stanford University Press, 2013).

Radiclani Clytus works at the intersections of new media and nineteenth-century American literature and visual culture. He has written extensively on transatlantic abolitionist imagery and is the editor of two compilations of prose by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa: Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries (2000) and Condition Red (2017). His current book manuscripts Graphic Slavery: American Abolitionism and the Primacy of the Visual and Old Media New Artists respectively examine the ocular-centric roots of antislavery rhetoric and the history of innovation and contingency in black expressive culture. As a documentary filmmaker, Radiclani Clytus has received commissions from Luhring Augustine, Steinway & Sons, and the United States National Park Service. His first film, Looks of a Lot, premiered at the Hirshhorn National Museum of Modern Art and his latest feature, Grammar, explores the interdisciplinary language of creative expression. He is the principal of RoundO Films LLC.

Dr. Darius Cooper is a writer and film scholar. He completed a Masters in Literature and Aesthetics at Bombay University in 1972 before getting a second Masters in Film and Literature at the University of Southern California in 1982. He completed his PhD there in 1989 and since then has held a position as Professor of Critical Thinking, Humanities and Film in the English Department of San Diego Mesa College. He has published a number of books including Between Modernity and Tradition: The cinema of Satyajit Ray (Cambridge University Press, 2000), In Black and White: Hollywood Melodrama and the cinema of Guru Dutt (Seagull Books, 2004) and The Fuss About Queens and Other Stories (OM Books International, 2014).

Dr. Cooper received a Doctorate in Comparative World Literatures and Film Studies in October 2005 from UCLA. Her teaching interests include Genres in Film and Theater, critical theory, transnational literatures. She currently teaches comparative literature, theater and film in the Comparative World Literatures Department at California State University Long Beach . She has read papers on cinema and contemporary television's "Mad Men" series, American Comedy genre and Bollywood cinema. She has published in journals such as Asian Cinema and Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.

Joan Copjec is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Author of 'Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists; Imagine There's No Woman'; and the forthcoming 'Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran', she was also editor of the S book series published by Verso; Umbr(a), a journal of Lacanian theory; and October, a journal of art/theory/criticism/politics. Before moving to Brown, she was Director of the Center for Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University at Buffalo.

Matthijs Cornelissen is a Dutch physician who settled in India in 1976. In 1981 he co-founded Mirambika, a research centre for integral education in New-Delhi. He is deeply interested in finding ways to introduce some of the psychological knowledge and know-how that developed as part of the Indian spiritual tradition into academic Psychology. To this end he founded in 2001 the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Consciousness Studies, and in 2006 the Indian Psychology Institute, both in Pondicherry. He organised several conferences, seminars and workshops, gave courses, edited books and published articles related to consciousness studies, yoga-based research methodologies and Indian psychology. Presently he teaches Integral Psychology at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry and maintains two websites http://ipi.org.in and http://saccs.org.in.

Charles Correa was a major figure in contemporary architecture around the world. His work includes the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Museum in Ahmedabad, the Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur, Kanchanjunga apartments in Mumbai, the Brain & Cognitive Sciences Center at MIT in Boston, and most recently, the elegant Champalimaud Centre in Lisbon.

Correa taught at several Universities in India and abroad, including Harvard, MIT and Berkeley, California. In 1985-86 he was appointed Nehru Professor at Cambridge, UK, and from 2000-09 he was Farwell Bemis Professor at MIT, Boston.

He has received the highest honours of his profession, including the Gold Medal of the RIBA, the Gold Medal of the UIA (International Union of Architects), the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and the Praemium Imperiale of Japan.

Laura joined the York Minster Centre of Excellence in Heritage Craft Skills and Estate Management in 2018 and at present works as a Research and Partnerships Manager. Laura is a Chartered Engineer and a member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. She began her career at JCB, working in various engineering and commercial roles. Her role at the Minster involves identifying best practice in heritage skills, investigating new technologies to enhance the skill base and increase the volume of conservation that can be undertaken.

Geoff Cox is Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University, co-Director of CSNI and Adjunct at Aarhus University, with a research interest in software studies and contemporary aesthetics. With Jacob Lund, he is co-editor of The Contemporary Condition book series published by Sternberg Press (since 2016), and with Joasia Krysa, co-editor of the open access DATA browser book series published by Open Humanities Press (since 2018, earlier with Autonomedia). With Christian Ulrik Andersen, he co-runs a yearly workshop/publication in collaboration with transmediale festival for art and digital culture in Berlin (since 2012). He has published widely, most often in collaboration, including, most recently Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Open Humanities Press, 2020) with Winnie Soon, the co-edited special issue Ways of Machine Seeing, AI & Society (Springer-Nature, 2021) with Mitra Azar and Leonardo Impett, and the multi-authored book Live Coding: A User’s Manual (MIT Press 2022). with Alan Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Thor Magnusson and Alex McLean.

Olivier Cunin is a qualified architect and holds a PhD in architecture. Since 1997, he has been researching the Khmer monuments, especially the Bayon style (end of the 12th century – beginning of the 13th century) by applying the methods of building archaeology and the scientific techniques of archaeometry. His 2004 thesis ‘From Ta Prohm to Bayon’ compared the architectural history of the Bayon style monuments. The chronology sequence for each monument built in Cambodia and Thailand in the Bayon style was developed on the basis of the mineral skeletons of the temples. In 2008 Cunin worked as a consultant for the Swiss team to design the permanent exhibition and interpretation centre at Banteay Srei. Since 2009, he is engaged with the virtual reconstruction of several Bayon style monuments and has received a prestigious fellowship from Centre for Khmer Studies (CKS) for the same. Along with co-authoring books on the most emblematic monuments of Banteay Chhmar (2005), The Bayon Temple (2007) and Preah Khan of Angkor (2011) he has published several research papers

Iftikhar Dadi is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art, and Chair of the Department of Art at Cornell University. Research interests include postcolonial theory, and modern art and popular culture, with emphasis on South and West Asia. His recent book is Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, and his essays have appeared in numerous journals and edited volumes. As an artist he collaborates with Elizabeth Dadi and has shown widely internationally.

Kurush F Dalal has a BA in Ancient Indian History and History from the University of Mumbai), an MA in Archaeology as well as a PhD in the early Iron Age in Rajasthan, both from Deccan College, Pune University. Subsequently, he shifted focus to the Early Medieval Period predominantly on the West Coast of India and excavated the sites of Sanjan, Chandore and Mandad. These excavations and the data recovered have had a strong impact on scholarship in the region. The recent Mandad excavations have revealed a brand new hitherto unknown Indo-Roman Port site with antecedents going back even further.

Dr Dalal also actively works on Memorial Stones and Ass-curse Stones in India and dabbles in Numismatics, Defence Archaeology, Architecture, Ethnoarchaeology and allied disciplines. He blends his passion for food and archaeology into research in Culinary Anthropology and Food Archaeology. He is Director of Instucen School of Archaeology and the Joint-Director of the Salcette Explorations Project, a massive Urban Archaeology Project documenting the Archaeology of Mumbai since 2015, thus extending his interest from the Medieval into the Colonial Period.

He has published over 35 papers and has read many more at National and International Seminars. He is a visiting lecturer at various Universities, Colleges, Schools and Government Institutions. He taught archaeology and allied subjects at the University of Mumbai for 10 years. He was Consulting Editor with Live History India from 2019 to 2020.

Smita Dalvi teaches architecture in Navi Mumbai and Mumbai. Her special interest lies in Indo-Islamic Art and Architecture on which she has delivered several guest lectures in India and abroad. In 2007, she was awarded the fellowship of 'Fulbright Visiting Specialist: Direct Access to the Muslim world'. Her research areas are in Architecture, Cultural History and Urban Heritage and she has read and published papers and articles in conferences and several architectural and cultural journals. In her research, she explores syncretism in art, architecture and society. She is an avid traveller and photographer. Currently, she is pursuing her doctoral studies at IIT- Bombay on the subject of Architecture and Cinema.

Abhijit Dandekar is Assistant Professor of Epigraphy and Numismatics at the Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, Pune. He received his doctorate in 2001 for his studies on Early Historic Ceramics of Mewar, Rajasthan. He specialises in Epigraphy, Numismatics, Ceramic Studies, Field Archaeology, Early Historic and Medieval Archaeology. He has edited volumes, research articles in national and international journals, as well as popular articles to his credit. Dr. Dandekar has directed the excavations and surveys at Chaul in 2008.

Vishal K Dar is a visual artist based in Delhi. Dar's art displays a playful approach to the use of material, media and technology.

Dr. Asok Kumar Das, an eminent scholar on Mughal Painting, was awarded his Ph.D. degree from the University of London in the History of Art. He worked as Director, Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum, Jaipur. His teaching career spanned Visva Bharati University as Satyajit Ray Chair and Jawaharlal Nehru University as visiting Professor. He has written extensively on Mughal Art. His monograph ‘Wonders of Nature: Ustad Mansur at the Mughal Court’ was published by Marg Foundation in December 2012.

Richard H. Davis is Research Professor of Religion and Asian Studies Programs at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he taught from 1997 to 2022. Previously he taught as assistant and associate professor in the Religious Studies Department at Yale University, 1987-1997. During that time he was also involved in helping establish the Committee on South Asian Studies of the YCIAS. He received a BA from the University of Chicago, an MA from the University of Toronto, and his PhD in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 1986.
His primary research interest is in the long-term history of Hindu religious traditions. His most recent publication is The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2014), which traces this important Hindu text over two millennia of its reception history. He is author of four other books: Ritual in an Oscillating Universe: Worshiping Siva in Medieval India (Princeton, 1991), Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, 1997, winner of the 1999 A.K. Coomaraswamy Award), Global India, circa 100 CE: South Asia in Early World History (AAS, 2010), and A Priest's Guide for the Great Festival (Oxford, 2010). He has edited two volumes, and also wrote the text for a catalog of Indian religious prints, Gods in Print: Masterpieces of India’s Mythological Art (Mandala, 2012). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship.
He is currently completing work on a book-length history of religions in early South Asia. This narrative history explores the origins and early development of the multiple religions that found their place in the Indian landscape in ancient and classical times: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and other less-known religions. The time range in this text runs from the earliest archeological evidence of religious practices in the subcontinent up to the period around 650 CE, a point of transition from “classical” or “late antiquity” to “early medieval” historical periods. His lectures at Jnanapravaha will be based on this current work-in-progress.

Harsha V. Dehejia has a double doctorate, one in Medicine and the other in Ancient Indian Culture, both from Mumbai University. He is a practicing physician and Adjunct Professor in the College of Humanities at Carleton University, Ottawa, ON., Canada. His main interest is in Krishna Shringara and has more than 30 books on this subject.

Vidya Dehejia is Barbara Stoler Miller Professor Emerita of Indian Art at Columbia University in New York, and author of a wide range of books on the history of Indian art. As a museum professional between 1994-2002, she served as Chief Curator, Deputy Director, and Acting Director of the Smithsonian’s Freer & Sackler Galleries in Washington DC.Her most recent books include The Thief Who Stole my Heart: The Material Life of Sacred Bronzes from Chola India, 855-1280 (2021), India: A Story through 100 Objects (2021),The Unfinished. Stone Carvers at Work on the Indian Subcontinent (Roli Books., 2015), The Body Adorned (Columbia University Press, 2012). In 2012, the President of India awarded her a Padma Bhushan for “Outstanding Contribution to Art & Education.”

Robert J. Del Bontà received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He has taught and been a guest curator for many shows at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco since 1978. He has also curated major exhibitions for the Berkeley Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art (one of which was exclusively on Jaina art); and was a major contributor to a Jaina exhibition for the Rubin Museum in New York City and elsewhere in the United States and Australia. He has published articles on a wide range of subjects including over thirty on Jaina material.

Dr. Devangana Desai, art historian, is the author of Art and Icon –Essays on Early Indian Art, 2013, Khajuraho - Monumental Legacy, 2000, The Religious Imagery of Khajuraho, 1996, Erotic Sculpture of India - A Socio-Cultural Study, 1985, and over ninety papers on various aspects of Ancient Indian Art. Dr. Desai is General Editor of the Monumental Legacy Series on the World Heritage Sites in India, being published by Oxford University Press. Dr. Desai is Trustee of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai, and Sarabhai Foundation, Ahmedabad. She was Editor, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, from 1992 to 2009. She is awarded the Hirayama Prize 2015 of Institut de France, Paris, for “the totality of researches in the field of Indian Art”. A Festschrift, entitled Art, Icon and Architecture in South Asia –Essays in Honour of Dr. Devangana Desai in two volumes, was edited by Anila Verghese and Anna Dallapiccola in 2015. Her Website: devanganadesai.com. She is associated with the Jnanapravaha (Mumbai) Aesthetic lecture series since the beginning

Dr. Prajna Desai is a writer of fiction and non fiction and an academic editor. She was trained as an art historian specialising in Pre-Columbian art and architecture. As a teaching fellow and adjunct faculty she taught for several years variously at Yale University, the College of Staten Island, Stern College for Women, and USC, in the United States.

Dr Faisal Devji is University Reader in Modern South Asian History at the University of Oxford. He is the Director of the Asian Studies Centre. He has held faculty positions at the New School in New York, Yale University and the University of Chicago, from where he also received his PhD in Intellectual History. He is a Fellow at New York University’s Institute of Public Knowledge, and was Yves Otramane Chair at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Dr Devji is the author of four books, the latest being 'Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea' (2013). He is interested in Indian political thought as well as that of modern Islam. Devji’s broader concerns have to do with ethics and violence in a globalized world.

Ganesh Devy, a literary scholar and cultural activist, writes in three languages – Marathi, Gujarati and English. Till 1996 he taught English literature at the M. S. University of Baroda. He left his academic position to take up conservation of threatened languages in India.
Among the several institutions he founded since then are the Bhasha Research & Publication Centre, Budhan Theatre and the Adivasi Academy.
He has put to script for the first time for 11 languages existing in oral traditions, promoted and published literature in 26 languages, helped educating in non-formal schools over 20,000 children from indigenous communities and has established economic empowerment activities in 2200 villages in tribal districts of Guajrat. Devy has campaigned for protection of the rights of nomadic and other discriminated tribes and has been Advisor to the Government of India on these issues.
Devy’s major publications in English include In Another Tongue (1993), Tradition and Modernity (1997), Painted Words(2002), Indian Literary Criticism: Theory and Interpretation (2002), A Nomad Called Thief: Reflections on Adivasi Voice and Silence (2006) and Indigeneity: Expression and Representation (2008). The G. N. Devy Reader (Orient Blackswan) containing four of his book length essays was published in 2009.

Dr. Debra Diamond is Elizabeth Moynihan Curator for South and Southeast Asian Art at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. She is currently re-cataloguing paintings in the collection, working on an international loan exhibition for 2022, A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur, and designing a digital component for an exhibition of Persian and Mughal painting, Writing My Truth: The Mughal Emperor Babur. Her most recent exhibition, Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice Across Asia (2017), was accompanied by the publication of Paths to Perfection, the museums’ first handbook of its Buddhist collections, and an app exploring Tibetan sacred spaces. She received her PhD in south Asian art history from Columbia University (2000). Dr. Diamond has curated numerous exhibitions at the Sackler Gallery, including Worlds within Worlds: Imperial Paintings from India and Iran (2012); In the Realm of the Buddha (2010); Facing East: Portraits from Asia (2006); Perspectives: Simryn Gill (2006); Autofocus: Raghubir Singh’s Way into India (2003); and the re-installation of Arts of the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas at the Freer.

Renate Dohmen is lecturer in art history at the Open University. Her book Encounters beyond the Gallery: Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Difference examines issues of contemporary art, aesthetics, anthropology and the global. She has published essays on cosmopolitanism, and explores transcultural perspectives in contemporary art as well as in colonial visual cultures with a focus on British India. She is editor of the section on British India in Art and its Global Histories: A Reader, co-author and editor of Art and Empire: British India.

Mladen Dolar taught for 20 years in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he now works as a Senior Research Fellow. He is the author of a number of books, most recently (with Slavoj Žižek) 'Opera’s Second Death'.

Dr. Saryu Doshi is a research scholar, an art historian, a curator and an editor. Her primary research interests lie in the field of Indian Classical and Contemporary Art. During her tenure as Hon. Director at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai she curated thirteen major exhibitions. She was Pro-term Chairman of the Lalit Kala Academy before which she was the Hon. Editor of Marg Publications. She served on the boards of various universities, academic and cultural institutions as well as government institutions. A recipient of the Padmashree award in 1999, she was also awarded the “Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity” by the Italian Government in 2008.

Stella Dupuis a Swiss novelist, an inexhaustible traveller, has worked extensively on the Yogini temples of India.

John E.Cort is Professor of Asian and Comparative Religions and holds the Judy Gentili Chair in International Studies at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. 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 many articles on the Jains, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2017-18.

Daniel Ehnbom is an associate professor of art emeritus at the University of Virginia. His undergraduate education was at The University of Wisconsin and Delhi University, and he received his MA and PhD from The University of Chicago. He is the author of Indian Miniatures: TheEhrenfeld Collection (New York, Hudson Hills Press, 1985), articles on painting and Indian architecture, and contributions to various exhibition catalogues. He was with the Macmillan/Grove Dictionary of Art (London and New York, 1996) in London as a contributor and consultant from 1984 and as South Asia Area Editor for Painting and Sculpture from 1988. Other of his publications include “Visions of the Blue God: A Note on Composition (and Performance?) in BhāgavataPurāṇa Illustrations,” The Journal of Hindu Studies, Vol. 11, no. 2 (August 2018), Pages 107–115; Realms of Earth and Sky: Indian Painting from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century (Charlottesville: The Fralin Art Museum at The University of Virginia, 2014) with contributions by Krista Gulbransen; and the essay "Masters of the Dispersed Bhagavata Purana", in Milo C. Beach; Eberhard Fischer, B.N. Goswamy, eds, Masters of Indian Painting: 1100-1900 (Zürich: ArtibusAsiae Publishers, Supplementum 48, I/II, 2011), volume 1, pp. 77-88.

Ehnbom, who retired in 2020, taught undergraduate survey lecture courses on Indian and Buddhist art, and upper-level undergraduate lecture courses and undergraduate and graduate seminars in specialized topics including 16th-century Indian painting and early Indian sculpture and architecture. He is an adjunct curator of South Asian art at the University of Virginia Art Museum and recently stepped down as a long time Director of the UVA South Asia Center. He has held fellowships from Fulbright, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Weedon Foundation. In the 2018 Trinity Term, he was a fellow at The Centre for Hindu Studies, Oxford. He has travelled extensively in Asia and has lived for extended periods in India and Pakistan.

Prof. Ioannis D. Evrigenis is a Greek-American philosopher, Professor of Political Science, and Director of International Relations at Tufts University. He is co-editor of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings (Hackett, 2004) and the author of articles on a wide range of topics in political theory. His first book Fear of Enemies and Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 2008) received the 2009 Delba Winthrop Award for Excellence in Political Science. His most recent book is entitled Images of Anarchy: The Rhetoric and Science in Hobbes’s State of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2014). At present, he is overseeing The Bodin Project at Tufts, aimed at a variorum edition of Jean Bodin’s Les six livres de la république. He holds A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation was awarded the Herrnstein Prize.

Massumeh Farhad joined the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in 1995 as Associate Curator of Islamic Art. In 2004, she was appointed Chief Curator and Curator of Islamic Art and since 2019, she has served as Interim Deputy Director for Collections and Research. She is a specialist in the arts of the book from sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Iran. Farhad has curated numerous exhibitions on the arts of the Islamic world at the Freer and Sackler, including Art of the Persian Courts (1996), Fountains of Light: The NuhadEs-Said Collection of Metalwork (2000), Love and Yearning: Mystical and Moral Themes in Persian Painting (2003), Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey (2005-6), The Tsars and the East: Gifts from Turkey and Iran in the Moscow Kremlin (2009), Falnama: The Book of Omens(2009- 10) and The Art of Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art (2016-17).
She received her Ph.D. in Islamic Art History from Harvard University in 1987 and has written extensively on seventeenth-century Persian painting, co-authored Slaves of the Shah: New Elites in Safavid Iran (2004) and Falnama: The Book of Omens (2009), and The Art of Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art (2016).

Gowhar Fazili teaches political science and sociology. His writing has appeared in various journals and edited volumes, and a monograph based on his doctoral thesis is slated to be published soon.

Finbarr Barry Flood is director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories, and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. His work engages the potential of material culture to nuance histories of transcultural or transregional connectivity in ways that challenge their instrumentalization in essentialist politics of the present. Recent publications include Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (Princeton University Press, 2009), awarded the 2011 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association for Asian Studies, Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l’Islam: pèlerins, reliques, copies (Musée du Louvre/Hazan, 2019) and Tales Things Tell – Material Histories of Early Globalisms, co-written with Beate Fricke, University of Bern (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Professor Gavin Flood FBA is Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion at Oxford University, Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, and Academic Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. His research is in the fields of Śaiva tantric traditions and comparative religion. Among his publications are Hindu Monotheism (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Religion and the Philosophy of Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) and The Truth Within: A History of Inwardness in Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Matthew Fuller is a cultural theorist who works on art, science, politics and aesthetics. His books include How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness (Bloomsbury 2018), How to Be a Geek: Essays on the Culture of Software (Polity 2017), with Olga Goriunova, Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (Minnesota 2019) and with Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (Verso 2021). He is Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.