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I am delighted to announce that, after careful consideration of the many abstracts submitted to us, we have drafted the symposium schedule as below. The exact timings are subject to change, but we hope that it communicates a flavour of the exciting papers that are promised for our gathering next spring.

Booking information will be made available soon.

Friday 10th April

3.00-4.15pm Registration, tea and coffee

4.15-4.30 Welcome, announcements

4.30-5.30 Opening Keynote Lecture: Professor Stephen Berkwitz (Missouri State University) – ‘So Near Yet So Far: Sri Lankan Strategies for Superseding Indian Cultural Forms’

5.30-6.30 Elizabeth Harris (Liverpool Hope University) – ‘Art, Liturgy and the Transformation of Memory: Christian rapprochement with Buddhism in post-independence Sri Lanka’

6.30-7.30 Dinner

7.30-8.30 Jessie Pons (Ruhr Universität Bochum) – ‘Visual Dialogues:
 The Archaeology of Inter-Religious Encounters in Pre-Modern India’

Saturday 11th April

9.00-10.00 Jonathan Geen (Western University, Ontario) – ‘Dialogue through Myth: Jain Forays into ‘Hindu’ Mythology’

10.00-11.00 Brian Black (Lancaster University) – ‘In dialogue with Krishna, in dialogue with the Bhagavad Gita

11.00-11.30 Tea and coffee

11.30-1.00 Postgraduate papers:

James Morris (St Andrews University) – ‘Hinduism and Japanese Religion’

Anja Pogacnik (University of Edinburgh) – ‘The Changing Marital and Familial Lives of Leicester Jain Women’

Lucian Wong (University of Oxford) – ‘Bhadraloka and Brāhmaṇical Polemics Against Vaiṣṇava Deviance’

1.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00-3.00 Martin Fárek (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic) – ‘Christian or Colonial? Debates about the Nature of Inter-Religious Dialogue in Nineteenth Century India’

3.00-4.00 Deborah Nadal – ‘Cows under crossfire: Interreligious debate on the economic exploitation of Indian cattle’

4.00-6.00 Free time to explore the city

6.00-7.00 Keynote Lecture: Professor Uma Chakravarti (National Fellow, Indian Council of Historical Research) – ‘Contentious Dialogues: Three Moments From an Argumentative Past’

7.00-8.30 Reception and dinner in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Spalding Symposium

Sunday 12th April

9.00-10.00 Lisa Wessman Crothers (College of Wooster, USA) – ‘Testing the Good Woman: Dialogue, Deception, and the Marriage of Amarā in the Bodhisattva Career’

10.00-11.00 Nathan McGovern (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) – ‘Brahmanical vs. Non-Brahmanical: Rethinking a Fundamental Dichotomy in Early South Asian Religion’

11.00-11.30 Tea and coffee

11.30-12.30 Hephzibah Israel (University of Edinburgh) and Matthias Frenz – ‘Dialogue and Narrative: Negotiating Religion, Language and Identity in Conversions to Christianity in South India’

12.30-1.00 Closing discussion

1.00-2.00 Lunch, followed by departure

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