Current Events

8:30 Arrival and registration

9:00 – 9:10 Welcome & Housekeeping

9:10 – 10:00 Keynote 1
Ankur Barua (Cambridge University)

15 min Break

10:15 – 11:45 Panel 1: Philosophy

Karen O’Brien-Kop (KCL): Using Samkhya to query ontological boundaries and mobilise consciousness in the Anthropocene

Rosina Pastore (UGent): Brahman and Cinema: Explaining Vedānta in 20th century North India

11:45 – 13:00 – Lunch

13:00 – 15:15 Panel 2: Tradition

Nabanjan Maitra (Bard): How to Re(Write) the Veda

Paola M Rossi (Milan): The poet ‘who fashions the boundaries’: Vedic poetry and mapping cosmos

Shivani Bothra (California State: Long Beach): Reimagining Dharma: Jain Migration, Gender, and the Shifting Boundaries of Tradition

15:15 – 15:30 – Break

15:30 – 17:45 Panel 3 Practice 

Neelima Shukla-Bhatt (Wellesley College): Dancing and Questioning Boundaries: Garbo, the Goddess Worship Ritual of Gujarati Women

Madhumita Sengupta (IIT Gandhinagar): Ashaan Bibi and the Cultural Resonances of Partition in Bengal

Sinah Kloß (Bonn): Hair, Heat, and Boundaries: Questioning the Material and Sensory Dimensions of the Body in Hindu Suriname

Dinner thereafter 18:45

9:00 – 11:00 Panel 4: Postgraduate Panel

Aamir Kaderbhai (Oxford): The Infinite Mirror: Questioning the Boundary between Reality and Imagination in the Mokṣopāya

Weibing NI (Cambridge): ‘Sita Crosses Kala Pani’: Retelling the Ramayana in the Caribbean

Simon Winant (UGent): Where Othering ends and Smothering begins: how to discuss the ‘Muslim’ merchant Saʽīd/Ṣadīq in Jain chronicles

Ojaswini Shekhawat (Yale): Fantasizing as the (Un)Attainable “Other”: A 17th Century Minor Sanskritist’s Take on the Mughal Harem

11:00 – 11:15 – Break

11:15 – 12:45 Panel 5: Epics

Brian Black (Lancaster): From the Margins to the Centre: Rethinking Nāgas in the Mahābhārata

Ayelet Kotler (Leiden): Persian Ramayanas and Mughal Cosmopolitanism

12:45 – 14:00 – Lunch

14:00 – 15:30 Panel 6: Lived Theology

Mukesh Kumar (Zürich): Fluid Frontiers of Faith: Boundary Crossing in the Ritual Ecology of South Canara

Maharshi Vyas (UNC Chapel Hill): What does it mean to be ‘tribal’? Questioning Identitarian Boundaries through Historical Interactions and Contemporary Lived Religious Realities

15:30 – 15:45 – Break

15:45 – 16:35 Closing Keynote
Prof. Monica Juneja (HCTS, Heidelberg University)

• 16:35 – 16:45 – Closing Remarks