ESIND - COST Action CA23144

Associate Professor Martin Fárek is member of the Department of Geography, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Humanities and Education, Technical University Liberec, Czech Republic. His work, inspired by the Comparative Science of Cultures research program, presents an analysis of several topics in relations between Europe and India: problems of conceptualization of the Indian traditions as Hinduism and Buddhism, debates about caste and race, and transfer of the Indian traditions to the West. He is the author of several books, the most recent are India in the Eyes of Europeans: Conceptualization of Religion in Theology and Oriental Studies (2021) and co-edited Western Foundations of the Caste System (2017 and 2020). Fárek took part in several projects, including the role of University of Pardubice academic coordinator for Svaagata.eu, Erasmus Mundus project focused on co-operation with Indian universities. He organized and led several university delegations to India, conducted research with his Ph.D. students there, and helped to develop ties between people of Europe and India in other ways.

Jakob De Roover is Associate Professor at Ghent University, Belgium. His work aims to contribute to the research programme Comparative Science of Cultures and has focused on problems of secularism, toleration, conversion, and European representations of Indian culture and society. He is the author of Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism (2015) and co-author of Religious Conversion: Indian Disputes and Their European Origins (2022).

I am a senior researcher and director at the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. I am the author of several academic books, numerous articles and edited volumes in Slovak, English and German. In 2017, together with Dušan Deák and Anna Rácová, I published a non-academic book called Farebná India (“Colourful India”). My most recent books are a monograph on the image of India in Slovak literature (Zobrazovanie Indie v slovenskej literatúre, 2018) and a translation of the principal Upanishads into Slovak (Upanišady, 2024).

My research interests have revolved around the cultural and literary connections between India and Slovenia in the wider historical context of former Yugoslavia and East-Central Europe. My area of study encompasses (post)colonial Indian modernity, Bengali literature, Anglophone Indian writers, the history of nationalisms and universalisms in South Asia and Europe, intellectual history of ideas (e.g. hospitality), avant-garde artistic movements between the two world wars, missionary encounters with India, etc. My approach draws critically on cultural and postcolonial studies perspectives.

Marianna Ferrara obtained her PhD in History of Religions from Sapienza University of Rome and worked on the relationship between politics and ritual in Vedic text. Currently she is an Associate Professor and her research interests focus on South Asian religions, intellectual history of religions between India and Europe and religious contact in the early modern history. More recently, she is exploring the role of Indian religions in the Eranos Tagungen held at Ascona under the guidance of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and Carl Gustav Jung.

As a graduate in the field of area studies, Dr. Zabarskaitė is researching the history and politics of South and Southeast Asia. After conducting several longer field-research periods in India, Indonesia, and Singapore while studying in Germany and Indonesia, she received her doctorate from the University of Heidelberg. She speaks German, English, and Lithuanian and has a working knowledge of Indonesian in addition to Sanskrit and Hindi.

Wim De Winter is currently employed as post-doctoral researcher at KU Leuven, where he focuses on early-modern intercultural interactions in the Pacific and Indian Ocean. He obtained his PhD at Ghent University in 2021 with a dissertation on the 18th-century Ostend Company's presence in Mughal India and Qing China. He teaches global history and historical anthropology with a focus on the Indian Ocean world and the conceptual implications of encounter in culture and religion.

Anna is a PhD candidate based at Technical University of Liberec. Her research interest consist of analysing Czech literature about Yoga. The main aim is to create a typology of specific representations and their underlying assumptions in Czech literature from 1850 to 1990.

Anita Stasulane, Professor of History of Religions, Director of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Daugavpils University (Latvia), graduated from the University of Latvia (1985) and the Pontifical Gregorian University (1998) in Rome (Italy). Her main field of research is cultural studies focusing on major paradigms of the new religious movements and youth culture. She has broad experience in executing international research projects.

Giuseppe Resta is an integrated researcher at CEAU (Centre for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism), Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, Portugal. He is a senior researcher in the project ID-SCAPES (ERC/COG/101125057). He previously held teaching positions at Yeditepe University (Istanbul) and Bilkent University (Ankara) as an assistant professor, and at Politecnico di Bari (Bari) as an adjunct professor. Resta received his Ph.D. in architecture from Università Roma TRE. His most recent monographic work is “Rediscovered Visual Documents of the Portuguese Estado da Índia” (CES, 2024, co-authored). He was recently awarded the Edilia and François-Auguste de Montêquin Fellowship by SAH (2026).

Antonia Navarro-Tejero is professor at Universidad de Córdoba (Spain), where she also chairs the Permanent Seminar on India Studies. She founded the Spanish Association for Interdisciplinary India Studies in 2007. She has held several scholarships, including Salvador de Madariaga fellow at Syracuse University (New York, USA) with Prof. Chandra T. Mohanty; Fulbright fellow at University of California-Berkeley with Prof. Bharati Mukherjee; and Rotary International fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi (India) with Githa Hariharan, among others. She is the author of more than 90 publications and is Editor-in-Chief of the "India Studies" series of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Prof. Navarro specializes on South Asian women writers and activist-scholars, and is currently main researcher of the group “Societies and Power Revisited: Environmental Humanities and Ecofeminism.”

Jaro Demetter graduated from Ghent University, Belgium, in 2024 and is now pursuing a PhD in the field of Comparative Science of Cultures. His research focuses on representations of Indian culture and society in Dutch and Belgian popular periodicals from the 19th and 20th centuries, and their relation to public perceptions and attitudes about India.

Knarik Sargsyan holds a research position at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, specialising in Middle Eastern and Arabic Studies, focusing on Qatari foreign policy and broader international relations in the Arab world. Her academic training and research experience are rooted in cross-cultural analysis, the study of political narratives, and the evolving relationship between Europe and the Middle East.

Hrachuhi Turvandyan is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Oriental Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, with academic interests spanning Oriental studies, political thought, and historical representations of the East. She conducted several research projects on Indian civilization, political philosophy, and colonial discourse in South Asia. These studies sparked a lasting interest in how Europe has represented and interacted with India and the broader Orient through texts, images, and diplomacy. Her academic trajectory has continued to explore these themes through a comparative and postcolonial lens, focusing on how historical encounters shaped cultural perceptions and strategic narratives.

Zuzana Čílová works as a project manager at the Technical University of Liberec. She has extensive experience with international projects, having worked for more than five years for the Czech National Agency for International Education and Research, which, as a provider, manages many international education programs, including Erasmus+.