Shubham Arora is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver), working under the supervision of Dr. Adheesh Sathaye. His research explores the intellectual history of premodern erotics (kāmaśāstra) from 300 to 1300 CE. His research interests include Sanskrit language and literature, South Asian religious and intellectual traditions, and gender and sexuality studies. He received his MA in Buddhist Studies, Philosophy, and Comparative Religions from Nalanda University in 2018. He is currently in residence at the University of Victoria’s Centre for Studies in Religion and Society as the Harold Coward India Research Fellow.
Christopher R. Austin completed BA and MA degrees in Religious Studies at Concordia University and a PhD in Religious Studies at McMaster University, with a doctoral dissertation treating the concluding section of the Mahabharata. Since 2009 he has taught widely at the undergraduate level at Dalhousie University on all major religious traditions of South and East Asia, as well as Sanskrit language, South Asian history, and late colonial and 20th century constructions of religion. His chief research focuses on the Mahabharata, Harivamsa and a number of Vaishnava Puranas, early developments of Vaishnava theism, and biographies of Krishna and his son Pradyumna.
Raj Balkaran, Ph.D., is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative literature. He is the author of The Goddess and the King in Indian Myth (Routledge, 2018), The Goddess and the Sun in Indian Myth (Routledge, 2020), and The Stories Behind the Poses (Leaping Hare Press, 2022). He has also co-edited Visions and Revisions in Sanskrit Narrative (Australian National University Press, 2023). He teaches at McMaster University, University of Lethbridge and hosts the Indian Religions podcast on the New Books Network. For more information see https://rajbalkaran.com
Sudha Berry is a corporate lawyer and an independent scholar with an abiding passion for the Indian epics, particularly the Mahābhārata. She was trained at the University of Toronto (1987) and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2010). Her research employs literary analysis to uncover thematic relationships with a focus on the interaction between the narrative and nature.
Yigal Bronner is Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Alberta in the department of History, Classics, and Religion. He studies Sanskrit poetry and poetic theory and South Asian intellectual history more generally. His recent publications include A Lasting Vision: Dandin's Mirror in the World of Asian Letters, a large multi-authored volume that he edited (Oxford University Press, 2023), and An Alaṅkāra Reader: Classical Indian Poetics (forthcoming, Columbia University Press).
Deepro Chakraborty is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion at the University of Alberta. He is critically editing a fourteenth-century Sanskrit text on grammar composed in Kashmir. His research interests include Sanskrit philology and textual criticism, Sanskrit linguistic traditions, Sanskrit literature, Indo-European linguistics, and premodern South Asian history.
Neil Dalal is Associate Professor of South Asian Philosophy and Religious Thought at the University of Alberta, where he teaches in both the Philosophy Department and History, Classics and Religion. His research explores philosophy of mind, contemplative psychologies, and meditation practices found in classical South Asian Yoga traditions.
Chris Framarin is a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Desire and Motivation in Indian Philosophy (Routledge 2009) and Hinduism and Environmental Ethics: Law, Literature, and Philosophy (Routledge 2014). He is currently working on a book titled Good Lives in the Mahābhārata.
Elisa Freschi studied Sanskrit and Philosophy. She has led various research projects at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto. She works on Philosophy in the Sanskrit cosmopolis and more specifically on topics of epistemology of testimony, philosophy of religion (“How do we define ‘God' and ‘atheism'?"), philosophy of language, deontic logic (“Why do people respond to commands?", “How can we formalise obligations and their interaction?") and on the re-use of texts in South Asian intellectual traditions, especially Mīmāṃsā and Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta. She is a convinced upholder of reading Sanskrit philosophical texts within their history and understanding them through a philosophical approach.
Timothy Lorndale is an independent scholar, based in Montréal, QC. He works on literature in Old Kannada and Sanskrit. He received his doctorate in South Asia Regional Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2022, and was previously the Bhagavan Shitalnath postdoctoral fellow in Jain Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga (2022-2024). He has also worked as a lecturer at Penn, McGill, UW-Madison, UT-Austin, and UTM. Dr. Lorndale's research focuses on the Mahābhārata's reception history in Old Kannada, and Digambara narrative literature.
Bill M. Mak is Professor of History of Science, University of Science and Technology of China, and Research Associate of the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge, U.K. His areas of research include the history of science in Asia, Sino-Indian historical relations, and Mahāyāna Buddhism. He completed his linguistic training at McGill University (B.A. Hons.) in 1996, specialising in Sanskrit and East Asian languages. After receiving his PhD in Indian languages and literature from Peking University in 2010, he held several research and teaching positions in Hong Kong (University of Hong Kong), Germany (Hamburg University), and Japan (Kyoto University). Mak has authored over 30 academic articles in peer-reviewed journals and is co-editor of Overlapping Cosmologies in Asia, published recently by Brill. He is now completing a book project titled Foreign Astral Sciences in China, from Six Dynasties to Northern Song, to be published by Routledge under the Needham Research Institute Monograph Series.
Amber-Marie Moore is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at University of Toronto (St. George), working with Jonardon Ganeri. Her areas of specialization are Buddhist Studies and Buddhist Philosophy with a focus on classical Nepalese, Newar, and Tibetan narratives and ritual texts in Vajrayāna Buddhism. Amber holds a PhD in Buddhist Studies from the University of Toronto, completed her BA in Buddhist Philosophy and Himalayan Languages at Kathmandu University, and an MA in Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University. At the University of Toronto, Amber lectures on topics such as South Asian Religions; Buddhist Philosophy; Buddhist Studies; Tibetan language; Buddhism and Science; practices of mind, body, and breath; Buddhism and the environment, and Buddhist dance. Her current research looks at the idea of philosophy as a practice and draws on Tibetan and Nepalese Buddhist sources to envision new positions on the nature of being, selves, and the idea of liberation. Her forthcoming book, tentatively entitled The Legend of Vajrayoginī,will be published by Vajra Publications in 2026.
Jason Neelis is an Associate Professor of South Asian religions and cultures at Wilfrid Laurier University since 2010, specializing in the history of Buddhism in the Northwest (ancient Gandhara and Upper Indus region in modern northern Pakistan).
Adheesh Sathaye is an Associate Professor of Sanskrit Literature and Folklore at UBC. He specializes in Sanskrit literary culture, focusing on ideas of performance, narrativity, and vernacularity across a diverse range of genres, from epic and puranic literature to poetry, folktales, and theatre.
Tulika Singh is a PhD Candidate at the University of Alberta, writing her dissertation on concepts of bodies and disabilities in early South Asia under the supervision of Prof. Dagmar Wujastyk. Tulika’s research interests include the social, cultural, medical, and disability history of premodern South Asia. Her doctoral project draws on textual and visual sources to examine how discourses on bodily disorders conceptualize “disability” in relation to class/caste, gender/sex, age, and religion based identities.
Dagmar Wujastyk is Associate Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Alberta in the department of History, Classics, and Religion. She is trained as an Indologist specializing in the history and literature of classical India. Her research focuses on the history of medicine and alchemy in ancient and medieval India.
Dominik Wujastyk (Prof. Emeritus) is a retired Sanskritist and historian. From 2015-2024 he held the Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity, 500 BCE - 500 CE, at the University of Alberta, Canada, where he taught South Asian history. He has conducted historical work on the intellectual history of classical India, especially the history of indigenous linguistics, science and medicine, with a focus on medieval manuscript sources. He is the founder of the international online forum INDOLOGY that since 1990 has provided an active and safe discussion space for professional scholars of early South Asia. He also founded the journal History of Science in South Asia (http://hssa-journal.org), and has led a research project on the history of ancient Indian medicine since 2021 (http://sushrutaproject.org).