Malini Ambach joined the Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia as a doctoral candidate under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ute Hüsken in October 2019. Prior to that she obtained her BA in South Asia Studies as well as her MA in Cultural and Religious History of South Asia/South Asian Studies from Heidelberg University.

Her doctoral project studies the multi-facetted sacred geography of the South Indian temple town Kanchipuram (Tamil Nadu) as presented in the place's glorifying texts in Sanskrit (māhātmya). It explores the structures, spatial orientations and means of inter- and trans-sectarian negotiation that shape the texts’ design of the city in a broader perspective and on the level of individual sacred sites.

Arkamitra Ghatak joined the Cultural and Religious History of South Asia Department as a Doctoral Student under Prof. Dr. Ute Hüsken in October, 2019. She holds a DAAD Scholarship as a part of the Graduate Programme of Transcultural Studies(GPTS-11) at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. In 2018, she completed her Masters in History from Presidency University, Kolkata in India. At present she is working on her Doctoral Project titled “The Female Guru as Jagadjananī: A Transcultural History of “Universal Motherhood” in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”. Her research interests include global and South Asian religious and intellectual history with a special focus on female agency and voices and ideas of spiritual motherhood.

Shefali More joined the Cultural and Religious History Department as PhD researcher and collaborator in Prof. Dr. Ute Hüsken’s project “Dynamics of Female Agency in Hinduism and Buddhism” in April 2018. She has studied Sanskrit Literature with specialisation in Vedic Studies at the University of Mumbai. At present she is working on her doctoral thesis “Role of Women in the Vedic Ritualistic Tradition”. Vedic Literature being her main area of interest, her research focuses on studying the social system in Vedic texts through its close analysis.

Sona Prahakaran, a DAAD fellow, joined the department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia in October 2018 as a doctoral candidate under the supervision of Professor Ute Huesken. A native of Kerala, she has an Integrated Master’s degree in Humanities and Social Sciences from IIT Madras and Aarhus University, Denmark. Her PhD title which has been tentatively titled as “Ritual Pluralism and Guardian Deity of Tamil Nadu: Shastric Amman vis-à-vis Amman of the Graveyards” shall explore sacred spaces produced and transformed by ritual pluralism in Tamil Nadu.

Before joining SAI, she worked with Stanford University (Rural Education Action Program) in assessing the quality of Engineering Education in India. Besides, she has been involved in numerous ethnographic projects dealing with gender and internal migration in India, study on miniature shrines in Chennai, assessment of canal construction, and status of rehabilitation and resettlement in Madhya Pradesh to name a few. Her scholarly orientation lies in Cultural Studies, Religious Studies, Literary Theory and Criticisms.

In 2018, Anna Scarabel obtained a M.A. in South Asian Studies with major in Classical Indology from the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University. As Ph.D. candidate, she then joined the Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ute Hüsken. The working title of the doctoral project is “The Coral Tree of Vedic Meanings.Two opposing ways of retaining the meanings of the Veda. Svāmī Karapātrī’s and Dayānanda Sarasvatī’s ideologies”. Her research deals with the creation of new interpretations of the Vedas in the colonial and post-colonial periods in India, and aims at outlining the complexities of modern re-interpretations of ancient meanings. In particular, she studies the Ārya Samāja’s philosophical tenets and the thought of Svāmī Karapātrī, a post-colonial Indian religious leader. Anna’s main research interests lie in the colonial and post-colonial studies, Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya Sanskrit textual traditions.

Kush Depala joined the Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia as a doctoral candidate under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ute Hüsken in July 2022. He completed his MA in Cultural and Religious History of South Asia at Heidelberg, and his BA in South Asian Studies and Study of Religion at SOAS, University of London, as well as on courses at AIIS Pune and in Gujarat.

His project, provisionally titled “Ritual Bodies, Ritual Identities: The role of ritual texts in forming belief and identity in two north Indian bhakti sampradāyas,” will explore the writing and use of proprietary, post-Vedic ritual texts in North Indian bhakti sampradāyas in both Sanskrit and Early Modern Hindi/Gujarati, focussing on the interplay between theology and liturgy. His research interests include codicology, digital humanities, performance, and bhakti literature.