The program can be found here in PDF form and on our Current Events page (subject to minor changes).
And ticket booking remains open on Eventbrite.
Friday 27 March
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
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
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
Brian Black (Lancaster): From the Margins to the Centre: Rethinking Nāgas in the Mahābhārata
Ayelet Kotler (Leiden): Persian Ramayanas and Mughal Cosmopolitanism
Sinah Kloß (Bonn): Hair, Heat, and Boundaries: Questioning the Material and Sensory Dimensions of the Body in Hindu Suriname
Dinner thereafter 18:45
Saturday 28 March
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
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
12:45 – 14:00 – Lunch
14:00 – 15:30 Panel 6
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