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The Future of Jain Studies

May 13, 2024
8:00 - 9:30 AM PST

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Presenter: Marie-Hélène Gorisse, University of Birmingham
Presenter: Tine Vekemans, Ghent University
Presenter: Christopher Jain Miller, Vice President of Academic Affairs, Professor of Engaged Jainism & Modern Yoga

Marie-Hélène Gorisse is the Dharmanath Assistant Professor in Jain Studies at the University of Birmingham. She received her PhD in philosophy and diploma in Sanskrit from the University of Lille and was a Guest Professor at Ghent University, a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS and a Postdoctoral Researcher in Leiden, Ghent and Birmingham. She specialises in Jainism and in the way its epistemology and hermeneutics are developed in dialogue with other South Asian philosophico-religious traditions. She also works on the contemporary relevance of Jainism as a contributor to the global philosophy of religion. She is the author of many papers, including ‘Jaina Philosophy’ in the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the editor of volumes like the special issue Knowing through perspectives in Jain philosophy. Historical approaches in the Journal of Indian Philosophy, and has done podcasts on Jainism, for example in Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s Closer to Truth, or Peter Adamson’s History of Philosophy without gap series.

Professor Tine Vekemans holds the Ācārya Mahāprajña Chair for Jain Studies at Ghent University. Additionally, she is a postdoctoral research fellow funded by the University’s Special Research Fund (BOF). Her approach to Jain studies combines ethnography with textual study, but always starts from practices and experiences of Jains. Over the past decade, her research touched upon diverse aspects of modern Jainism, including Jain migration history, changing lay- mendicant relations, Jainism in the digital age, and processes of knowledge transfer in the Jain diaspora. Her recent book, Digital & Diaspora – Intertwined Frontiers of Jainism, won the 2023 Bhagwan Kunthunatha Annual Best Book Award.

Christopher Jain Miller is the co-founder, Vice President of Academic Affairs, and Professor of Jain and Yoga Studies at Arihanta Institute. He completed his PhD in the study of Religion at the University of California, Davis and is also a Visiting Researcher at the University of Zürich's Asien-Orient-Institut and Visiting Professor at Claremont School of Theology where he co-developed and co-runs a remotely available Masters Degree Program focusing on Engaged Jain Studies. His current research focuses on Engaged Jainism and Modern Yoga, and he is the author of a number of articles and book chapters concerned with Jainism and the practice of modern yoga. Christopher is the author of Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation (Routledge 2024), as well as co-editor of the volumes Engaged Jainism: Critical and Constructive Approaches to the Study of Jain Social Engagement (SUNY 2025) and Beacons of Dharma: Spiritual Exemplars for the Modern Age (Lexington 2020).
The Future of Jain Studies
This panel considers the future of Jain Studies from particular methodological standpoints. The speakers emphasize the collaborative approach of European Jain Studies, demonstrating how their research, geographically situated within Europe, forms partnerships with collaborators across borders and institutions.

Christopher Miller will discuss, in dialogue with collaborators Cogen Bohanec (Arihanta Institute), Jonathan Dickstein (Arihanta Institute), and Venu Mehta (Claremont School of Theology), the methodology of Engaged Jain Studies from the forthcoming volume Engaged Jainism (Miller and Bohanec, SUNY 2025). He will feature the ways in which an Engaged Jain Studies methodology is necessary and useful while performing collaborative research projects with members of the Jain community and Jain institutions globally. The methods of Engaged Jain Studies create a research space where Jain and non-Jain ways of knowing can meet, collaborate, and, at times, experience irreconcilable frictions that generate productive research data and scholarly insights.

In dialogue with guests Mehool Sanghrajka (Institute of Jainology), Ana Bajželj (University of California Riverside), and Anil Mundra (Rutgers), Marie-Hélène Gorisse will first discuss the types of collaborations that develop between academic institutions, the Jain community, and other relevant partners such as social or artistic institutions. This will notably prompt us to focus on the question of the establishment and preservation of collections in Jain studies. She will then examine the growth of Jain philosophy as a discipline, presenting its current directions and challenges.

Together with guests and collaborators Manish Mehta (JAINA) and Yifan Zhang (Ghent University), Tine Vekemans will discuss studies on contemporary Jainism and Jainism outside of South Asia. As much of early Jain studies was of a philological nature, anthropological and sociological studies into Jain communities and practices are of a relatively recent date. Therefore, much is yet to be explored in order to balance interpretations based on doctrinal expectations on the one hand, and observations of the Jain tradition as it is experienced and performed by Jains on the other, and achieve a nuanced understanding of what Jainism was, is, and can be.