Archana Venkatesan is Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests lie in the translation of premodern Tamil poetry into English and in the intersection of text, visuality, and performance in South India. Her books include The Secret Garland: Āṇṭāḷ’s Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoḻi (2010), A Hundred Measures of Time: Nammāḻvār’s Tiruviruttam (2014), the multiple prize-winning Endless Song: Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi (2020), and with Crispin Branfoot, In Andal’s Garden: Art, Ornament and Devotion in Srivilliputtur (2015). She is the series editor for the translation of the Tamil Rāmāyaṇa of Kampaṉ and is also translating its fifth book (Sundara Kāṇḍam). Archana is the recipient of several fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts and was a UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow from 2014-2019. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.

 Anna Lise Seastrand is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota. She is broadly interested in the embodied experience of sacred space, portraiture, and text-image relationships. Her publications focus on the art and architecture of early modern southeast India. Her forthcoming book, South Indian Murals: Body, History, and Myth, won the 2022 Edward Cameron Dimock Prize from the American Institute of Indian Studies.

 Charlotte Schmid is Director of studies and chief editor of Arts Asiatiques and the Bulletin of the École française d’Extrême-Orient at the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO). She divides her research between two areas of fieldwork, the north and the south of the Indian subcontinent. After studying the earliest known representations of Kṛṣṇa in Mathurā, she had the good fortune to spend several years in the Tamil-speaking South and be initiated to Tamil and to Vishnuism in southern India. Her research now includes studies of the development of the iconography of female deities in the south of India and more specifically focus on the way the Tamil texts may match with their first known representations.

 Vasudha Narayanan is Distinguished Professor, Department of Religion, at the University of Florida and a past President of the American Academy of Religion. She was educated at the Universities of Madras and Bombay in India, and at Harvard University. She is the author or editor of several books and numerous articles, chapters in books, and encyclopedia entries. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from many organizations including the Centre for Khmer Studies; the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies/ Smithsonian, and the Social Science Research Council. She is currently working on the Hindu traditions in the United States and on a book focusing on the importance of the churning of the ocean of milk story in Cambodia.

 Jay Ramesh is a Lecturer in Tamil and Sanskrit at Columbia University. His 2020 doctoral dissertation examined the manner in which shrines, cities, and their surrounding landscapes were eulogized by poets in both of those languages, and the importance of the collective memory of a mythic past in the experiences of devotees visiting those sacred spaces. His current research focuses on the religious importance of river landscapes in premodern Tamil Nadu and on the consequences of environmental degradation faced by Hindus in that region today. In addition to Columbia, he has previously taught at Claremont McKenna College, the University of Wisconsin and Stony Brook University.

 Ilanit Loewy Shacham is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Department of East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on classical and pre-modern south Asian literature, especially poetry. Her current research project examines classical Telugu poetry from the Vijayanagara Empire, especially the literary corpus associated with Kṛṣṇadevarāya’s reign (1509-1529). She is also working on a collaborative project on the Telugu Mahābhārata by Nannaya Bhaṭṭa (ca. eleventh century) with Harshita Mruthinti Kamath (Emory University).  

 Valérie Gillet joined the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) in 2007 and was posted at the EFEO centre of Pondicherry, of which she became the Head in 2011.  Since 2017, she is posted in Paris, where she teaches at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) besides her research activities. Specialist of South India, she works mainly with material culture and Tamil epigraphy of the first millennium found on the territories of Pāṇḍya and Pallava dynasties, covering almost the entire Tamil-speaking Country. Her recent research has focused on patronage patterns, on the role of Minor dynasties and on the history of selected sites. She is also working on the development of an important divine figure of the Tamil Land, Subrahmaṇya, which led her to begin the exploration of material of the Andhra Country.

 David Pierdominici Leão holds a Ph.D. in Civilisations of Asia and Africa. After graduating in Classical philology at the Milan State University, he earned his Ph.D. from Sapienza University of
Rome. His doctoral dissertation, titled The Somavallīyogānandaprahasana of Aruṇagirinātha
Ḍiṇḍimakavi: critical text, translation and study, presented the first critical edition of a dramatic farce composed in the 15th century at Vijayanagara. Apart from the comic literature, his main research interests include manuscriptology, the South Indian Sanskrit production - especially the one connected to Vijayanagara, Thanjavur in Nāyaka and Maratha eras -, and the Pāṇḍya dynasty.
From October 2018 to April 2019, he was Jan Gonda Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden, the Netherlands. Since November 2019, he is post-doctoral researcher at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, with a project titled “The Fish on Mount Meru”: regionalism and Sanskrit cosmopolis in the Pāṇḍya identity and dynastic auto-perception from the Caṅkam era to the 17th century”, and financed by the National Science Centre (NCN).

 Leslie C. Orr, Professor in the Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University in Montreal, focuses in her research on the history of medieval and early modern Tamil Nadu. Among her recent publications are “Movement across the Divine Threshold in Medieval Tamilnadu: Dynamics and Interactions in the Space of the Temple and Beyond” (in The Hindu Temple: Materiality, Social History and Practice, Routledge, 2022), “ ‘The Lord who Dances’ in Medieval Tamil Inscriptions” (in Re-envisioning Śiva Naṭarāja: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, Brill, 2022), “Slavery and Dependency in Southern India” (in the Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol.2 (500-1420 CE), Cambridge University Press, 2021), and “Biographies of South Indian Temple Inscriptions” (South Asian Studies 35/2 (2019): 193-205).

 Crispin Branfoot is Reader in the History of South Asian art and archaeology at SOAS, University of London. He is an art historian with a particular interest in the temple architecture and sculpture of Tamil south India from the 15th to 20th centuries. His books include Gods on the Move: architecture and ritual in the south Indian temple (2007) and, with Archana Venkatesan, In Andal’s Garden: art, ornament and devotion in Srivilliputtur (2015).

Anna Lise Seastrand is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota. She is broadly interested in the embodied experience of sacred space, portraiture, and text-image relationships. Her publications focus on the art and architecture of early modern southeast India. Her forthcoming book, South Indian Murals: Body, History, and Myth, won the 2022 Edward Cameron Dimock Prize from the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Archana Venkatesan is Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests lie in the translation of premodern Tamil poetry into English and in the intersection of text, visuality, and performance in South India. Her books include The Secret Garland: Āṇṭāḷ’s Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoḻi (2010), A Hundred Measures of Time: Nammāḻvār’s Tiruviruttam (2014), the multiple prize-winning Endless Song: Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi (2020), and with Crispin Branfoot, In Andal’s Garden: Art, Ornament and Devotion in Srivilliputtur (2015). She is the series editor for the translation of the Tamil Rāmāyaṇa of Kampaṉ and is also translating its fifth book (Sundara Kāṇḍam). Archana is the recipient of fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts and was a UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow from 2014-2019. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.

 Paula Richman is Danforth Professor of South Asian Religions, Emerita, at Oberlin College, Ohio. She has published Extraordinary Child: Poems from a South Indian Devotional Genre (1997) and Women, Branch Stories, and Religious Rhetoric in a Tamil Buddhist (1988). She has also edited Ramayana Stories in Modern South India: An Anthology (2008) and co-edited A Gift of Tamil: Translations from Tamil Literature (1992). Her journal articles have dealt with Islamic Tamil poetry, secularism in Tamil country, Christian poems to Jesus, and Tamil writers such as Subramaniya Bharati, Periyar, C. Rajagopalachari, “Kumudini” Ranganayaki Thatham, Pudumaippittan, “Ambai” C.S Lakshmi and Bama. Currently, she is completing A Narrative and a Region: Rama and Sita in Tamil Country (under contract). She has held research fellowships at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Institute of Advanced Studies (2013) and at Harvard University’s Centre for the Study of World Religions (2011).

 Richard H. Davis is Research Professor of Religion at Bard College, New York. His publications include Lives of Indian Images (1997) and The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography (2015). He has also written a catalogue of early Indian chromolithograph prints, Gods in Print: Masterpieces of India’s Mythological Art (2012). His current projects are a cultural history of religions in early India and a study of the early history of religious prints in modern India.

 Indira Viswanathan Peterson is Professor Emerita of Asian Studies, Mount Holyoke College. A scholar of Sanskrit and Tamil literature and Hinduism, she has published widely on South Indian literary, social and cultural history and performing arts. She is also interested in translation, European-Indian culture contact, and comparative literature.

Peterson is the author of Poems to Śiva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints; Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kirātārjunīya of Bhāravi; and Arjuna and the Hunter. Other books include: The Great Temple at Thanjavur: A Thousand Years (with George Michell); Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in modern South India (ed., with Davesh Soneji); and Tamil Geographies: Cultural Constructions of Space and Place in South India, (ed., with Martha Selby). Nearing completion are Tanjore Renaissance: King Serfoji II and South Indian Modernity, a cultural and intellectual biography of the royal polymath Serfoji; and Drama, the Court and the Public in Early modern South India, a book on drama at the Thanjavur Maratha court and the Tamil region from the 17th to the 19th century.

Vidwan Sikkil C. Gurucharan
(Carnatic Vocal)

Kamalakiran Vinjamuri
(Violin)

Abhinav Seetharaman
(Mridangam)