SPEAKERS

 

Karl Baier (University of Vienna)

Karl Baier is a Professor for Religious Studies and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna. His main areas of research are mesmerism, occultism, the history of modern yoga and the psychedelic movement.
His publications include the two-volume Meditation und Moderne (Königshausen und Neumann, 2009) and Karl Baier, Philipp Maas, Karin Preisendanz (eds.): Yoga in Transformation. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Vienna University Press, 2018).  

Keith Cantu (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Keith E. Cantú is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies (South Asian religions with an additional emphasis in European medieval studies) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). His dissertation research is focused on the nineteenth-century Tamil Śaiva yogī Śrī Sabhāpati Swāmī (b. 1840), specifically the "translocalization" of his system of Rājayoga. He also is researching Śrīśacandra Basu (a.k.a. S.C. Vasu, 1861-1918), a Bengali intellectual living in Lahore who was Sabhāpati Swāmī's initial editor as well as an important nineteenth-century translator of Sanskrit texts on Haṭhayoga. Apart from yet intersecting with this material, Keith has a keen personal and academic interest in the writings of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) as well as Thelema, the Theosophical Society, and other alternative religious movements.

 

Julie Chajes (Tel Aviv University)

Julie Chajes is a historian interested in the ways religion, science, and scholarship intersected in nineteenth-century Britain and America. She is particularly interested in the literature of Spiritualism and occultism and what it reveals about the overlaps between heterodox religiosity and “mainstream” culture. Born in Brazil and raised in the UK, Dr. Chajes teaches at Tel Aviv University. Her articles have dealt with such topics as gender, Orientalism, emergent critical categories and the appropriation of scientific and medical theories in modern forms of religion.
 

Philip Deslippe (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Philip Deslippe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work focuses on Asian, metaphysical, and marginal traditions in the United States. He has published articles in the Journal of Yoga Studies, Amerasia, Contemporary Buddhism, and Sikh Formations, and he edited and introduced a new and definitive edition of the metaphysical classic The Kybalion for Tarcher/Penguin (2011).

 

Gordan Djurdjevic (Simon Fraser University)

Gordan Djurdjevic holds a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is co-editor, with Henrik Bogdan, of the collection of critical essays Occultism in a Global Perspective (Acumen, 2013; rpt. Routledge, 2015); and the author of Masters of Magical Powers: The Nath Yogis in the Light of Esoteric Notions (VDM, 2008); India and the Occult: The Influence of South Asian Spirituality on Modern Western Occultism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and, with Shukdev Singh, Sayings of Gorakhnāth: Annotated Translations from the Gorakh Bānī. Djurdjevic teaches, as a Sessional Instructor, in the Department of Humanities at Simon Fraser University.

 

Caterina Guenzi (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Social [EHESS], Paris)

Caterina Guenzi is Associate Professor at the EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) and member of the Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS). She is also editor-in-chief of the quarterly journal L'Homme: revue française d'anthropologie. As an anthropologist, she has conducted fieldwork among astrologers in Banaras. The English edition of her French book is forthcoming with the title Trysths of Destiny. Practising Astrology in North India (SUNY Press). She is currently working on the translation of an early 18th century Sanskrit treatise, the Karmavipākasaṃhitā.

 

Peter Heehs (Independent Scholar, Puducherry)

Peter Heehs is an independent scholar based in Pondicherry, India. He has published more than sixty articles in journals such as History and Theory, Modern Asian Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, and magazines such as History Today and Art India.  He is the author or editor of twelve books, the most recent of which are The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (Columbia University Press, 2008), Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs and the History of the Self  (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013 by Choice), and Spirituality without God: A Global History of Thought and Practice (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

 

Magdalena Kraler (University of Vienna)

Magdalena Kraler is a PhD candidate at the Department for Study of Religion, University of Vienna. She is currently working on various aspects of breath control (prāṇāyāma) and rhythmic breathing in early modern yoga. Her special interest lies in (the history of) the intersecting fields of transnational physical culture (dance, gymnastics, yoga, body and breath work) and alternative religious movements with their common features of physical and spiritual practice, notions of the subtle body and eventual artistic implications. Magdalena holds a M.A. degree in Music and Dance Education.

 

Mriganka Mukhapadhyay (University of Amsterdam)

Mriganka Mukhopadhyay is a PhD candidate at the Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently working on the history of the Theosophical movement in Bengal for his PhD project. Prior to this, he studied History at Presidency University (Kolkata) and Ambedkar University (New Delhi) from where he earned his M.A and M.Phil degrees respectively. He is interested in the history of occultism and Western esotericism in India, Modern Hindu Studies and history of Indian nationalism.

 

Tim Rudbøg (University of Copenhagen)

Dr. Tim Rudbøg is associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and has a background in the history of religions. He is Director of The Copenhagen Center for the Study of Theosophy and Esotericism and head coordinator of SNASWE, The Scandinavian Network for the Academic Study of Western Esotericism. Rudbøg’s PhD thesis from the University of Exeter was specifically dedicated to the study of H. P. Blavatsky’ Theosophy and many of Rudbøg’s publications have focused on Theosophy and its relation to the East, especially the forthcoming anthology to be published by Oxford University Press entitled Imagining the East: The Early Theosophical Society.

 

Julian Strube (University of Heidelberg)

Julian Strube focuses on the relationship between religion and politics, specifically in the context of esotericism. He has previously worked on the relationship between esotericism and socialist, National Socialist, and völkisch context in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His current project focuses on the role of Tantra in colonial Bengal, against the background of global debates about religion, science, and national identity.