Biographies

JOEL BORDEAUX is a specialist in South Asian religions with a PhD from Columbia University (2015). He has published on East Indian Śākta traditions, early modern Hindu statecraft, Nath Yogi literature from Bengal, and Tibetan Buddhism in Anglophone popular culture. He is a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden and a member of the research group Body and Embodiment in the Middle Bengali Imaginary based at Jagiellonian University (Kraków) (https://linktr.ee/JoelBordeaux).

PARASHAR KULKARNI (https://sites.google.com/view/parasharkulkarni) studies politics, religion, and utopias in colonial and contemporary India and the British Empire. He teaches at Yale-NUS College and has a PhD from New York University.

PONGSIT PANGSRIVONGSE is a researcher specialising in the Sanskritic culture of medieval Nepal who recently completed a DPhil at the University of Oxford (2023) on Guhyakālī worship in the Malla period. His area of interest concerns Tantric manuscripts from the Kathmandu Valley, especially those of the Kaula tradition and the relationship between literary and material culture. An ongoing area of research for him is the identification of obscure Malla-era iconography using largely unstudied textual sources.

JASON W. SMITH is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University in Macon, GA. He received his doctorate in South Asian Religions from Harvard Divinity School. His research focuses on the relationship between religion and literature in premodern South Asia. His current book project examines the reception history of the Tirukkuṟaḷ in Tamil-speaking South India.