Dear All,

We are delighted to announce the dates and call for papers for the Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions 2027.

As the Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions enters its fifty-second year, we turn to a theme that runs through the foundations of religious thought and practice in South Asia: the work of making, mapping, and maintaining the world. This year the Symposium will be hosted at Selwyn College of the University of Cambridge by Dr. Chris Jones, who has joined Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity as Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies.

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Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions, 2027

The Faculty of Divinity & Selwyn College, University of Cambridge

Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th April, 2027

Call for Papers – Proposal submission deadline: 15 November 2026

Theme: Making, Mapping, and Maintaining the World

To make a world is to bring it into being, be it through cosmogonic narrative, ritual performance, the consecration of an image, or the founding of a textual canon or a religious community. To map a world is to both order and locate it—through sacred geography and pilgrimage, cosmological diagrams, as well as genealogies of lineage and transmission, or the categories, colonial and contemporary, through which traditions have been classified and compared. And to maintain a world is to sustain it against entropy and challenge—through dharma and law, the governance of temples and  institutions, the repetition of ritual calendars, the preservation of manuscripts, and the stewardship of bodies, communities, and environments.

We invite papers related to any of these themes, individually or in interplay, from the humanities, social sciences, and other disciplines, employing textual, ethnographic, visual, material, or digital methodologies, and spanning historical and contemporary contexts. 

Presenters are allocated thirty minutes for their paper and fifteen minutes for discussion. The conference will be in person. While we hope to cover some presenter costs, a conference fee will apply.

We also welcome proposals from advanced doctoral candidates, who as part of a dedicated graduate panel 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://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe88tVU3UAz7e3q3IWjNWdhc5UYdRMdNuBXBgSeVEnTu4ZxNQ/viewform?usp=dialog), with a title, abstract (maximum 500 words), short bio and affiliation, to the Spalding Symposium committee, by 15 November 2026.

Due to the typical volume of submissions, individual feedback on proposals cannot be provided. Successful proposals will be announced in early December 2026.

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

With best wishes,

Dr. Chris Jones (Cambridge)
– local convenor 2027

and

Kush Depala (Heidelberg), Dr. Hershini Soneji (Cambridge), & Dr. Saran Suebsantiwongse (Leiden)
– the organising committee