Archives: Team Members

Arti Dhand is Associate Professor of South Asian Religion at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include the Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and The Mahabharata, and she is the author of Woman as Fire, Woman as Sage. Most recently, she is also host of The Mahabharata Podcast. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Shubha Pathak, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion, American University, interprets epic myths from India, Greece, and Rome.  Having authored Divine Yet Human Epics: Reflections of Poetic Rulers from Ancient Greece and India, she is a Steering Committee member of the American Academy of Religion’s Mahābhārata and Classical Hinduism Seminar.

Greg Bailey, formerly Reader in Sanskrit, is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Linguistics and Culture, La Trobe University, Melbourne. He has published translations and studies of the Gaṇeśa Purāṇa, Bhartṛhari’s Śatakatrayam and books on early Buddhism, Australian politics and many articles on Sanskrit literature.

Simon Brodbeck studied at the University of Cambridge and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a Reader in Religious Studies at Cardiff University, where he has worked since 2008. His books include The Mahabharata Patriline and Krishna’s Lineage: the Harivamsha of Vyasa’s Mahabharata.