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Pronoy Chakraborty studies the literature attributed to the tantric Buddhist/ Śaiva Nātha mahāsiddhas (masters of magical powers) living in India between the 8th and the 12th centuries CE, and their iconographic depictions in Himalayan Buddhist art as well in the art of the Śaivite Nātha…

Thomas Kingston is a PhD student in South and Southeast Asian Studies. His primary academic interest lies in the histories of knowledge and power in the British-ruled parts of Southeast Asia in the late 17th to mid-20th centuries. More specific research interests within this broad…

Laurence worked on Tibetan Buddhist canons, Kangyurs and Tengyurs, in her MA program. Her current interest is in Tantric Buddhism, especially Indian Tantric Buddhism, and the tantric texts preserved in Dunhuang manuscripts. The language Laurence uses in her research is mainly Classical Tibetan and Chinese….

Solihin is a graduate student enrolled in the M.A./Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley's Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies. His academic interest in the literary output of the Malay World builds on his training from the B.A. (Hons) in Literature that he received at…

Vincent Pacheco is a Ph.D. student in South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. His main areas of academic interest center on Southeast Asian cinema and literature, post-Marxist theory, and nineteenth-century gothic literature. Currently, his research aims to unpack Southeast Asian populism by looking…

Ishaan Sharma is a PhD Student in South & Southeast Asian Studies. His project is a study of the Udyogaparva (Book of Effort), the final pre-war book of the Mahābhārata. Specifically, he is interested in the relationship between Artha and Dharma in the book and…

Akshita is interested in studying women’s roles in Hindu communal, religious and nationalist politics through a focus on emotion as a category of analysis. To this end, she will focus on popular, vernacular material read as part of ritual performances in post-independence India – particularly…

Petra studies Buddhist thought in India, especially early Buddhism and Mahāyāna, and Buddhist narrative literature of Nepal. Her languages are Sanskrit, Pāli, and Classical Tibetan. She holds a BA in Theatre from Lewis and Clark College and an MA in Buddhist Classics from Dharma Realm…

Daniel Owen is a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s South & Southeast Asian Studies MA/Ph.D. program with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory. His work largely focuses on Indonesian poetry and poetics from the 1960s to the present and poetry’s entanglements with social change throughout…

Christian Gilberti is a Ph.D. candidate in South and Southeast Asian Studies. His primary academic interest is in late 19th to mid-20th century Burmese cultural history and politics. His dissertation will focus on the growth of a Bamar ethnic cultural nationalism in colonial Burma from 1895-1948…