Christoph Emmrich (PhD University of Heidelberg, 2004) engages with fields as diverse as Nepalese and Burmese Buddhism, Sanskrit, Pali, Newar, Burmese and Mon literature and Tamil Jainism. He works with girl children, young women and ritual specialists among the Newars in the Kathmandu Valley (Nepal) and in Yangon, Mandalay, and Mawlamyine (Burma) studying their involvement in Buddhist practices related to marriage, education, monastic ordination and the consecration of images. He confronts the history of their local and academic exegesis and contrasts both with the prescriptive/descriptive literary history of ritual manuals, poetry, and modern novels in Newar, Nepali, Sanskrit, or Burmese, covering the period between the early 17th century and the present, with the personal and ethnographic remembrance of singular religious events. Christoph Emmrich further works on on the historiography of Tamil Digambara Jain literature, temple ritual, and education in North and South Arcot (Tamil Nadu, India). In his work he addresses questions of resemblance and resistance, transfer and translation, mimesis and memory.

Ellen Gough is an associate professor in the Religion Department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her research focuses on Jain ritual, material culture, and narratives. Her book, Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation, was published by Chicago University Press in 2021.

Kristi L. Wiley is retired from the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught Sanskrit and Indic religions in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. She is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Jainism (the A to Z of Jainism) and a co-editor of Brill’s Encyclopedia of Jainism, along with John E. Cort, Paul Dundas, and Knut A. Jacobsen. Her research has focused on various aspects of karma theory.