Team
Peter C. Bisschop
Professor of Sanskrit and Ancient Cultures of South Asia, Leiden University
Peter Bisschop is Professor of Sanskrit and Ancient Cultures of South Asia at Leiden University. He specializes in the dynamics of textual production, Sanskrit narrative literature, and early Brahmanical Hinduism. He is the principal investigator of the ERC PURANA project.
Elizabeth A. Cecil
Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of Religion, Florida State University
Elizabeth A. Cecil is Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University. Her scholarship explores the history of Hindu religions in South and Southeast Asia through the study of text, image, monument, and landscape. She is a Research Collaborator in the PURANA project.
Yuko Yokochi
Professor of Sanskrit Literature, Kyoto University
Yuko Yokochi is Professor of Sanskrit Literature at Kyoto University. Her research covers Hindu religious culture in medieval India with a particular focus on goddess worship. She is a specialist of Sanskrit narrative literature and a main editor of the critical edition of the Skandapurāṇa. She is a Research Collaborator in the PURANA project.
Sanne Dokter-Mersch
Postdoctoral Researcher, Leiden University
Sanne Dokter-Mersch is postdoctoral researcher in the PURANA project. Her research concerns the composition and intertextuality of the Bhaviṣyapurāṇa. She also contributes to the critical edition of the Skandapurāṇa.
Ayelet Kotler
Postdoctoral Researcher, Leiden University
Ayelet Kotler is a postdoctoral researcher in the PURANA project. She is a historian of Indo-Persian literary culture. In her research she focuses on Mughal-era Persian translations of Sanskrit narrative literature, and specifically renditions of Puranic narratives and the Sanskrit epics. She is interested in translation studies, narratology, Persian philology and poetics, Persian narrative poetry, and Mughal history.
Saran Suebsantiwongse
Postdoctoral researcher, Leiden University
Saran Suebsantiwongse holds a PhD in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Cambridge and a Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art from SOAS. His research focuses on the material culture of South and Southeast Asia in relation to Sanskrit texts and epigraphy. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Material and Visual Culture of Southeast Asia under the ERC’s PURANA Project at Leiden University.
Olli-Pekka Littunen
PhD candidate, Leiden University
Olli-Pekka Littunen is a PhD candidate in the PURANA project at Leiden University. The main focus of his research is to investigate the historical process of the sanctification of Vārāṇasī, the celebrated pilgrimage destination on the banks of the Ganges in the state of Uttar Pradeś in North India.
Kexin Zheng
PhD candidate, Leiden University
Kexin Zheng is a PhD student at the Leiden University Institute of Area Studies. She studies the historical development of the tulāpuruṣadāna (‘gift of the man on a balance’), one of the sixteen mahādānas (‘great gift’ ceremonies) of brahmanical Hinduism. In the tulāpuruṣadāna the king’s body is weighed against gold, which is subsequently given away. In her work she engages with the ritual descriptions in various sources, including the Purāṇas as well as their quotations in the medieval Dharmanibandha literature.
Arya Adityan
PhD student, Florida State University
Arya Adityan is a PhD student in the Department of Religion at Florida State University, where she focuses on indigenous traditions within Hindu religions of South India through the study of regional oral narratives, performances, ecologies, and material culture. Having been research assistant in 2023-2024, she remains affiliated with the PURANA project.
Anwesha Sengupta
PhD candidate, Columbia University
Anwesha Sengupta is a visiting researcher at LIAS and the Purana project. She is an advanced doctoral candidate in the Department of Middle-Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University in New York City. Her research interests broadly include the translation and circulation of early modern narrative poetry in Avadhi and Persian, and digital methods for textual analysis. For her doctoral research, she is working on the sixteenth-century Avadhi narrative poem Kanhāvat and its relation to translations of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa.
