Dagmar Wujastyk is an Associate Professor in the department of History, Classics, and Religious Studies.  She is an indologist specializing in the history and literature of classical South Asia, including Indian medicine (Ayurveda), iatrochemistry (rasaśāstra), and yoga.  Her publications include Modern and Global Ayurveda – Pluralism and Paradigms (SUNY Press) and Well-mannered medicine. Medical Ethics and Etiquette in the Sanskrit Medical Classics (OUP NY). She is the editor of a special volume of Asiatische Studien/ Études Asiatiques, entitled “Histories of Mercury in Medicine across Asia and beyond” (vol. 69.4, 2015), a special volume of History of Science in South Asia, (vol. 5.2, 2017) entitled “Transmutations: Rejuvenation, Longevity, and Immortality Practices in South and Inner Asia,” and Associate Editor of the journal Asian Medicine.  In 2015, Prof. Wujastyk received a European Research Council “Horizon 2020” award to head a research team working on the entangled histories of yoga, medicine and alchemy in medieval India.  The project website is http://ayuryog.org/

Further information on Dagmar´s work and publications

Starting a PhD course focussed on the history of ancient Indian phonetics (शिक्षा), using sources in the Sanskrit language.

Research Interests:

• Feminist, Marxian, Postcolonial Theory
• Critical Race, Anti-Caste, Indigenous and Colonial Studies
• Cultural Politics of Development, Gender, and Nationalism
• Performance, Political Activism, and Feminist Praxis
• South Asia, South Asians in Canada

My research and teaching focuses on transnational feminist and de/anti/post/colonial approaches to state violence, development discourses, and activism.  Read more at my University website.

Dominik Wujastyk is a professor in the Department of History and Classics and Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity.  His early training was in the Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit languages, and his first research project was on formal rule conflicts in the generative Sanskrit grammar by Panini.  As a curator of Sanskrit and Prakrit Manuscripts at the Wellcome Library in London, he published widely on Indian codicology.  Later, as a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at University College London, he taught and published in the history of medicine in India and South Asia, and this has remained an active research area.  Over the last five years, he has begun publishing research on the history of classical Yoga in India, and that has immediately connected with aspects of early Indian Buddhism, out of which Yoga arose.

For more information and to download his publications, see http://ualberta.academia.edu/DominikWujastyk.

Dr. Vallianatos’ research and teaching focuses on the topics of food, gender, body and health. In many of her studies, Dr. Vallianatos has used visual methods in conjunction with semi-structured or narrative interviewing. She is also committed to conducting collaborative, community-based research, and typically works in interdisciplinary teams.  Past and ongoing research includes examining food consumption during pregnancy in New Delhi, India and food, gender and health practices among indigenous peoples in Bangladesh.  [Read more]

Jane Allred is a Ph.D student in History, with a special interest in philology and the history of ideas. She is especially interested in the grammatical tradition of South Asia (Sanskrit: vyākaraṇa) and the history of the study of language. Her thesis research will concern grammars of Kannaḍa in medieval and early modern Karnāṭaka in South India. She holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Hawai’i.

Prof. Julia Byl joined the University of Alberta in 2015, after serving at King’s College London for three years as a post-doctoral fellow and Malay Case Study leader on the European Research Council project, “Musical Transitions to Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean.” She received her doctorate in ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan, studying with Judith Becker and Richard Crawford. She has taught at King’s College London, the University of Illinois, Pomona College, and her alma mater, St. Olaf College, where she was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow. Her recent book, Antiphonal Histories: Resonant Pasts in the Toba Batak Musical Present was published in 2014 as a part of Wesleyan University Press’s Music/Culture series.

Lisa Allette Brooks holds a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion. Lisa studies the history and practice of medicine and healing in first millennium South Asia and contemporary ayurvedic medicine in Kerala with a focus on gendered medical embodiment, sensory knowledges, and multispecies medicine. Lisa’s current book project, Leech Trouble: Therapeutic Entanglements in More-Than-Human Medicine, is a history of human-leech medicine in South Asia and a comparative ethnography of leech therapy in contemporary ayurvedic medicine and biomedicine. Lisa’s recent publications include “The Vascularity of Ayurvedic Leech Therapy” in Medical Anthropology Quarterly 35.1 (2021), “A Surgeon’s Hand” in Asian Medicine 15.1 (2020), and “Whose Life is Water, Whose Food is Blood” in Fluid Matter(s) ANU press (2020). Lisa co-edited special issue of Asian Medicine, “Medicines and Memories in South Asia” 15.1 (2020) and is the South Asia book review editor for the journal Asian Medicine and reviews editor for History of Science in South Asia. Lisa completed a PhD in South and Southeast Asian Studies with Designated Emphases in both Science and Technology Studies and in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at UC Berkeley.

For more information about Lisa’s work see: https://ualberta.academia.edu/LisaBrooks

Louise Harrington joined the Department of English and Film Studies in 2017 as an assistant professor in postcolonial and South Asian literatures. She completed her graduate studies at SOAS, University of London.

Her research and supervisory interests include:
Postcolonial, global and comparative literatures; South Asian literatures and cultures; war, (post-)conflict and partition; spatial literary studies and theory; borders, boundaries and walls.

See also

• https://ualberta.academia.edu/LouiseHarrington (downloadable publications)
• https://www.ualberta.ca/arts/about/people-collection/louise-harrington

In the third year of a PhD course focused on the history of Ayurvedic medicine and Indian science, working with sources in the Sanskrit language.

Neil Dalal is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in Philosophy and Religious Studies. His primary research explores the intersection of Indian philosophy and religious praxis in classical Yoga philosophies and their Sanskrit commentarial traditions. He is co-director of Gurukulam (Matson Films), a feature length documentary on Advaita Vedānta, and co-editor of Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics: Rethinking the Nonhuman (Routledge Press). Prof. Dalal’s current research analyzes debates in early Advaita Vedānta over meditative and contemplative practices, and how they employ textual knowledge, memory, and visualization to understand consciousness.  For more information, see https://apps.ualberta.ca/directory/person/ndalal.

Patricia Sauthoff is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta with the ERC-funded AyurYog project. She is an interdisciplinary scholar focused on longevity and immortality in religious, ritual, medical, and alchemical literature. Her training includes Religious Studies, History, and journalist methods. Patricia holds a PhD in South Asian Languages and Cultures, with a focus on Sanskrit, from SOAS, an MA in History from SOAS, an MA in Eastern Classics from St. John’s College, Santa Fe, and BAs in English and Religious Studies from the University of Colorado. Patricia has taught in the USA, India, and Canada. In 2022 she published her first monograph, Illness and Immortality (Oxford University Press), focused on rites to conquer death in the Netra Tantra.

Prof. Mookerjea is Director, Intermedia Research Studio, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta and Research Coordinator, RePublicU, a critical university studies research collaboration.  His research areas include Commons Theory, Decolonizing Critical Theory, Intermedia Research Creation, and
Development Dispossession.  See further, https://www.ualberta.ca/arts/about/people-collection/sourayan-mookerjea