Biographies

PUSHYA A. GAUTAMA (MD) is an Ayurveda physician, and a doctoral scholar at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (Consciousness Studies Programme), Bengaluru, India. She is currently working on her thesis which explores conceptions of well-being in the Caraka Saṃhitā through the lenses of consciousness, self, and life purpose. Her research interests include the philosophy of health and illness in Ayurveda, the phenomenology of healing, and body in Ayurvedic textual and practice traditions, and the interfaces between Ayurveda, and local healing traditions in South India.

SANGEETHA MENON is Professor and Head of the Consciousness Studies Programme, and Dean of the School of Humanities at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, in the Indian Institute of Science campus, Bangalore (India). The latest publication by Prof. Menon is an edited volume on AI and the new Humanism published by Springer. She works with collaborators across many countries in creating and encouraging a first-person-centred approach to understanding consciousness and cognitive capabilities that favours experiential well-being. One of her primary contributions is in presenting and engaging with the concept and experience of self from the neurobiological and philosophical point of view, and theorising a ‘self-challenged brain and brain-challenged self’.

OLGA NOWICKA, PhD, is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at the University of Hamburg, where she is working on the DiPiKA project (Digital Preservation of Kerala Archives). She obtained her PhD from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Department of Languages and Cultures of India and South Asia. Her doctoral thesis entitled In the Footsteps of Śaṅkara: Topographies in Local Hagiographies and Advaita Vedānta Monastic Tradition in Kerala concerned the phenomenon of inscribing the vernacular Śaṅkaran monasticism in the literary cartographies charted by the Keralan hagiographic narratives. Her research interest focuses on the manuscript cultures and the normative texts of the Advaita Vedānta monastic tradition of Nampūtiri brahmins in Kerala.

STHANESHWAR TIMALSINA received his PhD in 2005. The same year, he joined the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. He has also taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Washington University in St. Louis; and the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Dr Timalsina joined Stony Brook University as Nirmal and Augustina Mattoo Chair of Classical Indic Humanities in 2023. Dr Timalsina has authored four books in English: Seeing and Appearance: A History of the Advaita Doctrine of Dṛṣṭi-Sṛṣṭi (Shaker Verlag, 2006), Consciousness in Indian Philosophy (Routledge, 2009), Language of Images: Visualization and Meaning in Tantras (Peter Lang, 2015), and Tantric Visual Culture: A Cognitive Approach, (Routledge, 2015). Dr Timalsina has also written and published books in Sanskrit and Nepali languages. Besides these, he has published more than 80 refereed journal articles and book chapters. Since 2019, Timalsina has been offering free online courses on various aspects of Tantra and Indian philosophies through the Vimarsha Foundation.