Dear members of the list,

We are delighted to announce the dates and call for papers for the Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions 2025.

We hope that many of you can join us at this special gathering to celebrate an incredible half century of scholarship, research, and community and to reflect together on the future.

Please see the Call for Papers below and hold the dates – more information to follow soon.

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Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions, 2025
Christ Church, University of Oxford

Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th May 2025

Call for Papers – Proposal submission deadline: October 30th 2024

Theme: Festivals and Celebrations

To celebrate its 50th anniversary as the foremost UK academic event on Indian religions, this year’s symposium invites papers that address the theme of festivals and celebrations.

South Asian festivals play a pivotal role in the social and religious lives of millions. Festivals, broadly defined by Grimes as a “ritual form of celebration” (1982), often take place within the public space, and they invoke “alternative worlds that are connected with special expectations, special connections and special modes of consumption.” They occur “in separate spheres in terms of time and space” (Hüsken and Michaels, 2013), thus functioning as “a liminal time set apart from the ordinary,” (Ilkama, 2023). It is in these spheres that text, ritual, material, performance and much more come together to form a “festival” that is greater than a sum of its parts. This symposium invites papers that explore public, ritualised celebrations taking place in South Asia or having South Asian origins from a variety of disciplinary approaches and methods.

Proposals are expected to address the theme of the conference.

Our purview includes both religions of South Asian origin wherever in the world they are being practised, and those of non-South Asian origin present within South Asia. 

We welcome papers based upon all research methods, including anthropology, material culture, textual studies, religious studies, history, art history, heritage studies and performance studies. 

Keywords: 

Festivals, celebrations, utsava, yātrā, melā, jayantī, harvest, national/local, cultural heritage, ritual cycles, material culture, food, space, landscapes, globalism, digital festivals, diaspora, diversity, tribal and folk expressions, calendars 

Presenters are allocated forty minutes for their paper and twenty minutes for discussion. As the conference will be in person, a conference fee will apply. 

We also welcome proposals from advanced doctoral candidates, who will be allocated twenty minutes for their paper and ten minutes for discussion. Doctoral students may be entitled to bursaries if their papers are accepted.

If you would like to give a presentation, please fill out this Google form (https://forms.gle/a4b21qhDRPhJX5Fp8) with a title, abstract (maximum 500 words), short bio and affiliation to the Spalding Symposium committee, by 30th October 2024.

Due to the typical volume of submissions, individual feedback on proposals cannot be provided. Successful proposals will be announced in November 2024.

For further enquiries please email the committee on the email address: spaldingsymposium1@gmail.com.

With best wishes,

Kush on behalf of 

Prof. James Mallinson (Oxford) 

– convenor 2025

and

Dr. Pranav Prakash (Oxford), Dr. Karen O-Brien-Kop (King’s College London) & Kush Depala (Heidelberg)

– the organising committee