Team Members | Page 3 of 9 | Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies Online

Dr Bihani Sarkar

Bihani Sarkar holds an associate faculty membership of the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, a Research Membership of the Senior Common Room, Wolfson College, University of Oxford and a part time fixed term Lectureship in Religious Studies: Hinduism and Buddhism at the University of Winchester. At Winchester she convenes two undergraduate modules, ‘Living Religions: Hinduism and Buddhism’, and ‘Hinduism and Modernity’. She is the author of Heroic Shāktism: the cult of Durgā in Ancient Indian Kingship and Classical Sanskrit Tragedy: the concept of suffering and pathos in medieval India.

Dr Måns Broo

Måns Broo is a senior lecturer in Religious Studies at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. His research interests include yoga, tantra, and Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Dr Broo is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.

Prof. Christopher Key Chapple

Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and founding director of the Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University (LMU). in Los Angeles. He has published more than twenty books including Karma and Creativity; Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions; Yoga and the Luminous; Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Elements in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas; and several edited volumes on religion and ecology. He has received numerous grants for his research, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright Nehru Fellowship program. He serves on the advisory boards for the Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale), the Ahimsa Center (Pomona), the Jaina Studies Centre (London), the Dharma Academy of North America (Berkeley), the Uberoi Foundation (Denver), the South Asian Studies Association (Los Angeles), and the International School for Jain Studies (Delhi). He also teaches online for LMU’s Center for Religion and Spirituality.

Prof. Hugh B. Urban

Hugh B. Urban is interested in the study of secrecy in religion, particularly in relation to questions of knowledge and power. Focusing primarily on the traditions of South Asia, he is author of Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion (2003) and Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (2006), among other books.

Dr Harshita M. Kamath

Harshita Mruthinti Kamath is Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Assistant Professor of Telugu Culture Literature and History at the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. Her research focuses on Telugu performance and literary performance traditions.

Prof. James Hegarty

James Marcel Hegarty is Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions at Cardiff University. He is fascinated by the history of religions in South Asia. He has written on Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh and Christian traditions in the region. In particular, he is interested in how religious texts, and especially religious stories, are used by South Asians to communicate and negotiate their understanding of themselves and the world around them. This includes not just what we ordinarily associate with religion, such as ideas of god or gods, or the nature of the good life, but also other forms of knowledge, such as the way in which the past is understood, or political life, or language itself.

Dr Ilanit Loewy Shacham

Prof. Ilanit Loewy Shacham is Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on premodern and classical South Asian literature in Telugu and Sanskrit.

Dr Adam Bowles

Dr Adam Bowles is Senior Lecturer in Asian Religions at The University of Queensland in Australia. He has published three volumes concerning the Mahabharata. Two of these are translations of the Karṇaparvan published with the Clay Sanskrit Library. The other, entitled Dharma, disorder and the political in Ancient India: The Āpaddharmaparvan of the Mahābhārata, is a study of one of the didactic corpora belonging to the Santiparvan. He is also currently working on a large project titled The Queensland Atlas of Religion and begun translating the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata’s Anusasanaparvan.