Former Ph.D. Student Copy of Dr. Malini Ambach

Malini Ambach studied Cultural and Religious History of South Asia and South Asian Studies and at Heidelberg University (M.A. in 2018). In 2019, she began her doctorate at the Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia at Heidelberg University and defended her dissertation at the beginning of 2025. Together with Ute Hüsken and Jonas Buchholz (Heidelberg University / Heidelberg Academy of Sciences), she has edited the volume Temples, Texts, and Networks: South Indian Perspectives (Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2022).

Her doctoral project titled “Multifarious Sacred Geographies: Considering Kanchipuram Through Its Sanskrit Sthalamāhātmyas” explores the sacred geography of the South Indian temple city Kanchipuram (Tamil Nadu). The city has received a large number of Sanskrit and Tamil texts glorifying it, testifying to its particularly diverse religious landscape with over 400 temples and shrines. The local traditions of Śaiva, Vaiṣṇavas, and Śāktas presents their interpretations of Kanchipuram’s sacred space, the sacred places and their residing deities through these glorifying texts, allowing for a fruitful comparative approach to explore the intersectarian conception and negotiation of the city’s sacred geography. Malini Ambach has analysed three of these Sanskrit texts called Sthalamāhātmyas in depth, with a focus on the literary maps of Kanchipuram depicted in them, which link mythology to the local physical landscape. Her doctoral project contributes to the growing body of research on Sthalamāhātmyas by understanding the sources as spatial texts and adopting a literary-geographical approach that has rarely been followed so far in this context. It was supervised by Prof. Dr. Ute Hüsken and Prof. Dr. Jörg Gengnagel (Würzburg University).