We congratulate Dr. Borayin Larios. After 10 years at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg, he has recently been appointed as university assistant at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna in Austria. He is now assisting Prof. Martin Gaenszle who is the Chair of South Asian Studies in Vienna, where among other tasks, he will continue to work on his second book on popular religion in the urban public space in the city of Pune, Maharashtra.

Larios came to Heidelberg in 2008 to start his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Axel Michaels. His dissertation was published by De Gruyter in 2017 under the title: Embodying the Vedas. Traditional Vedic Schools of Contemporary Maharashtra and is available in Open Access here: https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/480043  

Since his doctoral defense in 2013, he has been active at the SAI in a number of research projects and also as a lecturer offering interdisciplinary courses.

We wish him all the best, thank him for his precious work at SAI and hope to see him from time to time in Heidelberg. 

We cordially congratulate Malini Ambach, who completed her M.A. in Cultural and Religious History of South Asia in the summer term, for receiving an Exposé-scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation). This scholarship enables former scholarship holders of the Studienstiftung to conduct an academic working phase after graduation and before starting their dissertation. It supports projects that aim at the conception and preparation of innovative PhD projects.

For six months starting in January 2019, Ambach will work on the topic “Religious Networks between the Pilgrimage Centres of Kāñcīpuram and Vārāṇasī and their Sacred Geography in Comparison“. Sanskrit texts from the genre of Māhātmyas which use mythological narratives to describe the sacred spaces and the efficaciousness of Kāñcīpuram and Vārāṇasī serve as a basis for her work. Her project is affiliated with the Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia.